The EU integration project seems now witnessing a stalemate in the market dimension (the Bolkestein directive; the failure of the energy/financial trans-European players); institutional dimension (the breakdown of the Constitutional Treaty ratification; the conflicts around the common budget); social dimension (the Lisbon strategy flaking; the relinquishing of the new governance instruments). Through the conventional lenses of integration theory, these resistances can be seen as the resilience of nationalism to defend keys sovereignty competences against their shift at the European level: But this framework can hardly lead the analysis somewhere but to recast the standard normative discourse about the nation-state primacy vs. the EU one, about what the Union actually should be.
A different story instead underline how the EU has developed as a transnational regime based on common public policies. Common policies are then not just the ultimate reason for a EU common system, but also where integration actually happens. The EU as a "policy-based integration programme" has to induce a consistent policy change therein to succeed, in order to push the domestic convergence, and to build a common policy space. Thus, no wonder that in the '80s the Union project linked itself to neo-lib ideology: It was chosen by many national élites as answer to the claimed ¿government failure¿, it defined a new orthodoxy for some powerful international epistemic communities and organisations, it promised a coherent change in many policy sectors and, moreover, it gave the lever to shake the domestic ¿social trusts¿ standing in defence of old and increasingly worthless solutions.
This work aims to test the hypothesis that we are witnessing now could be more the erosion of the neo-lib administrative policy frame than that of the integration programme itself, and how and where an alternative common policy frame could actually be shaped to boost the convergence process.