One of my favorite books on the politics of the European Union is Keith Middlemas's 1995 study Orchestrating Europe, which stepped outside the standard confines of treaties, rules, and formal institutions to examine the informalities of the process of European integration. Where much of the work on the EU is both heavily theoretical and conceptual, and can sometimes seem to have only an obscurely intellectual relationship to the realities of politics in Brussels, Middlemas offered a revealing survey (based on numerous interviews with practitioners) of what happened during the process of making and implementing policy on Europe. It emphasized the importance of looking beyond the formal rules and institutions and understanding instead the informality of interactions among elites and interests.

As a part of the discourse on the politics of the European Union in particular, and on political interactions in general, the dynamics of informality deserves more attention, and hence this new treatment by Jeffrey Stacey is particularly welcome. Using the perspective of rational choice theory, he sets out to explain the bargains struck among the Big Three European institutions (the European Council, the European Commission, and the European Parliament), challenging what he describes as the “myth” that European integration is largely explainable by the negotiation of treaties. “It seems,” he argues, “that scholars and journalists alike have trouble ascertaining what EU insiders encounter in Brussels on a daily basis” (p. 2). This was a problem noted as early as 1975 by Donald Puchala, when he reflected on how often he had heard the complaint from officials in what was then the European Economic Community that political scientists, in their search for explanatory models of the community, were “working at levels of theoretical abstraction too far removed from day-to-day political behaviour” and were painting “elaborate and sophisticated pictures of phenomena that are simply not happening” (“Domestic Politics and Regional Harmonization in the European Communities,” World Politics 27 [July 1975]: 496–520).

The need to take studies of the EU out of the ivory tower and into the realities of daily life in Brussels and Strasbourg is clear, and Stacey's work makes a valuable contribution in this regard. He notes that studies of the informal rules of the EU are surprisingly rare, which he explains by arguing that scholars of the EU often wrongly assume that political actors will refuse to be bound by them in light of their nonlegal status. He then sets out to examine how informality helps explain how institutions change, to argue that the rules of the game are supplied by the players themselves, and to take on the liberal intergovernmentalists by arguing that the process of European integration stems less from formal intergovernmental agreements than from informal changes to the rules. He contends that often, the changes confirmed formally by the treaties have already been agreed to in the informal sphere; the treaties merely formalize the changed balance of power that has resulted from the informal dynamics of discussions among the Big Three institutions.

The book opens with an outline of Stacey's theory of informal politics, challenging intergovernmentalist notions of the manner in which EU member states have pooled sovereignty. He argues that where the study of sovereignty transfers in the EU focus almost exclusively on the treaties, those transfers are in fact subject to informal pressures that do not depend upon formal bargains; he describes this as interregnum integration, or “informal accords interpolated in-between treaties during normal periods of EU activity” (p. 10). The informal accords, he suggests, amount to the creation of new rules that not only reinforce the treaties but sometimes alter and even replace the formal provisions of the treaties.

The author then goes on to describe (with an early nod to the work of Middlemas) the informal accords, showing what it was about the EU that has allowed the informal sphere to develop. Stacey emphasizes the contribution of the relatively novel institutional nature of the EU, as well as the political opportunism of the European Parliament, and also notes the manner in which the treaties often specify ends without providing details of the means to achieve those ends. “Each time the member states strike a grand bargain in the form of a treaty,” he suggests, “they create a relatively hollow skeletal structure onto which the Three must graft the flesh and muscle of policy-making specifications.” (p. 22).

The rest of the book focuses on presenting the evidence for testing the theory, much of the emphasis being on activities within the European Parliament in its “self-professed role as the EU's prime mover of informal interorganizational dynamics” (p. 119). If there is one aspect of the debate that deserved more attention, it is the EU's much-discussed democratic deficit. Stacey offers a passing reference, but given the importance that he ascribes to informal bargains, he should probably have addressed the implications for the democratic deficit in more depth. It is easy to conclude from his thesis that the manner in which informal decisions are made supports popular notions of the EU institutions as elitist and as insufficiently transparent or responsive to the demands of public opinion.

For Integrating Europe, Stacey, who works for the U.S. State Department, drew in large part on interviews he had conducted over a period of 15 years with officials from the Big Three EU institutions. The book, his first, is an impressive piece of work and should give him a distinctive niche in the scholarship of the EU: He not only makes a compelling argument that will contribute to our understanding of the dynamics of the EU but also makes it clearly. Too much of the academic writing on the European Union is esoteric, the arguments too often obscured by a density of language that can be a mystery to all but the initiated. This book has none of these problems. Stacey provides regular road maps through the construction and logic of his arguments, and overall offers a convincing and well-supported set of conclusions that should be of interest to scholars and practitioners alike. Informality is too often overlooked as an explanation of political action, and it is to be hoped that this book will go some way toward helping correct the too-narrow picture often painted of the institutional dynamics of the EU.