This book focuses on an important topic, namely the manner in which the European Union integrates and undertakes regulation. Eurolegalism underlines and amplifies the widely held tenet that European integration is very much a matter of “integration through law,” but it adds a distinct twist to this story through the focus on regulatory style: “The central argument of this book is that the process of European integration is encouraging the spread of a European variant of adversarial legalism, which we can call Eurolegalism” (pp. 7–8) The idea of adversarial legalism was developed by Robert A. Kagan to depict the distinct American style of regulation through litigation. Kelemen underlines that this is marked by “(1) detailed, prescriptive rules often containing strict transparency and disclosure requirements, (2) legalistic and adversarial approaches to regulatory enforcement and dispute resolution, (3) costly legal contestation and multifaceted megalawyering techniques, (4) active judicial review of administrative decisions and practices, and frequent judicial intervention, (5) frequent private litigation concerning regulatory policies. Above all, American-style adversarial legalism is distinguished by its emphasis on enforcing legal norms through transparent legal rules and procedures and broad access to justice, empowering private actors to assert their legal rights” (p. 6).

The book carefully defines and sets out to discern indicators of adversarial legalism. It also establishes a set of causal factors or conditions that are seen to stimulate it, with particular emphasis on the processes of national-level deregulation and European-level reregulation associated with the development of the EU's single internal market, coupled with a fragmented EU institutional structure, marked by a weak administration but a strong judiciary. These important structural similarities between the EU and the United States push the EU in the direction of American-style adversarial legalism. Kelemen seeks to establish how prevalent these are in the European Union. He does this first through a broad survey of the EU, which is supplemented with three case studies of securities regulation, competition policy, and disability policy. Each case study establishes the situation prior to the 1980s in the EU and in the member states; how and the extent to which the EU context changed during the critical phase of the 1980s and 1990s; and concomitant changes in four member states, namely, Germany, France, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom.

The point is to highlight the increased similarity between the EU and the United States in terms of mode of governance and regulatory leitmotif. The author is careful, however, to stress that this is not a matter of direct diffusion, or Europe becoming a carbon copy of the United States. The European version is less conflictual and in overall terms less manifest than its American counterpart. There are important countervailing, or stymieing, factors in Europe: “One of the central puzzles addressed in this study is why a legal style that almost no one explicitly advocates is spreading so widely” (p. 10).

The book's specific object is the European Union. But its theme also contributes to our understanding of the broader phenomenon of juridification, or the manner in which law permeates and shapes policymaking and society. The author provides an account of how the European Union, an entity frequently depicted as a polity sui generis (or what Jacques Delors has termed an objet politique nonidentifié), has increasingly come to adopt the distinct American regulatory style that so many Europeans denounce and that runs contrary to the consensus-seeking approach to regulation and state–society relations that have marked many European states and their version of capitalism.

An important merit of the book is the attempt to establish how prevalent this change is across time, issue areas, and a select number of member states. The most-different-systems design is used to test whether the phenomenon appears across distinctly different contexts. Comparison is thus used to discern how prevalent the indicators of adversary legalism are across the EU; it is also used to discern whether the EU is becoming similar to the United States. This latter facet raises the question of comparison as strategy, as a means to frame the analysis and as a means to justify why a particular research angle is chosen. It is then tempting to think in terms of an implicit, universalizing, comparative strategy, which “aims to establish that every instance of a phenomenon follows essentially the same rule” (Charles Tilly, Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons, 1984, p. 82). The general assumption is that the two cases, United States and the EU, share enough in common to be converging on adversarial legalism.

The author notes that the extent to which adversarial legalism has taken root in Europe varies considerably, and he also points to delimiting factors. This points us toward an encompassing strategy, which would “place different instances at various locations within the same system, on the way to explaining their characteristics as a function of their varying relationships to the system as a whole” (Tilly, p. 83). The general system would be the broad and multifaceted process of global juridification, and the aim would be to clarify why the United States and the EU came to highlight two features of it, namely, juridification as increased conflict solving by reference to law and juridification as increased judicial power, that is, a process by which the legal system and the legal profession get more power. The book does not, however, attempt to establish how pervasive adversarial legalism actually is in the United States.

We might say that the book has elements of both strategies. I think it would have benefitted from making a clearer choice. That is also because it does not provide a systematic assessment of similarities and differences in macroscopic context; thus, we do not know the effects of the fact that the United States is a state, whereas the EU is lacking in core state features. The financial crisis shows how European leaders can run roughshod over the treaties, both factors that bring into question the very constitutional anchoring of the EU. Without a clearer sense of the magnitude of structural difference and similarity between the EU and the United States, the overall trend toward adversarial legalism will ultimately remain indeterminable.

We do need to pay explicit attention to macroscopic conditioning factors. Consider one core aspect of what Kagan highlights in adversarial legalism, namely, the American “mistrust of concentrated power, both governmental and economic, and … a corresponding propensity to fragment power and to constrain it by law and courts” (Robert A. Kagan, “The ‘Non-Americanisation’ of European Law,” European Political Science 7 [March 2008], pp. 21–31: 23). Kagan's argument is not only that mistrust is an element of American political culture but also that American institutions are programmed to sustain it. How do we establish that European integration is bringing in a similar change in political culture, with a similar view of institutions? This is a matter of understanding those factors that sustain and undermine trust. Many analysts have underlined that the European Union is an extreme consensus-seeking system, with strong consultative procedures. This is also manifested in policymaking and implementation and the notion of fused administration. The Union brings decision makers and experts together from across levels and includes or consults with other stakeholders. These features have made proponents of experimental governance, such as Charles F. Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin, point to political fragmentation as a critical factor in fostering experimental governance. Elliot Posner and Yane Svetiev have studied EU securities regulation and competition policy and have found that in both cases, the development of the EU's internal market has taken the EU closer to experimental governance (in Charles F. Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin, Experimentalist Governance in the European Union, 2010). The proponents of experimental governance also point to deliberation and learning as important factors in action coordination.

An important question is whether the development of the EU's internal market is foremost a matter of reregulating to deal with structural constraints or is imbued with a more pronounced neoliberal ideology. The answer we give has important bearings on the degree to which the EU sparks adversarialism.

Eurolegalism is a well-crafted and well-written book that is a welcome contribution to the debate. It does raise a number of questions, though. One is about theory and how far we can rely on Kelemen's version of institutionalism to capture cultural-ideational factors. Another is about regulatory style: What is necessary to study in order to understand the development or change in regulatory style in a given polity? The problem seems particularly acute in the EU context because the EU relies so heavily on integration through law; the regulatory style that it actively propounds is also a core element in the effort to stabilize the system that is being developed. The present crisis puts this system to the test. Whether the EU is able to survive and whether the system of rules that comes out of this can lay any claim to democratic legitimacy is shrouded in uncertainty.