Introduction

Abstract

This book has two fundamental purposes. First, it represents our attempt to make an original scholarly contribution to the literature on EU politics and policy-making. It is the product of a four-year research project on EU decision-making, which has focused primarily on specific cases of decision-making in the period 1994–8. We have done the legwork: tracking policy proposals as they have evolved from the ‘twinkle in the eye’ of a policy entrepreneur to the ‘setting’ of an EU policy. We have conducted nearly 500 interviews in Brussels and eight national capitals, collected archive material from EU and national holdings, and trawled the fast-expanding EU literature. Our research has been systematic but we are unashamed to describe our methodology, following Fenno (1996), as ‘soaking and poking’: soaking up archive and interview material (particularly concerning our selected case studies) and then poking around to answer questions that arose from the ‘soaking’, or finding explanations for things that just did not quite add up.