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Abstract:
The complexity of the multilevel European polity is not adequately represented by the single-level theoretical concepts of competing `intergovernmentalist' and `supranationalist' approaches. By contrast, empirical research focusing on multilevel interactions tends either to emphasize the uniqueness of its objects, or to create novel concepts - which are likely to remain contested even among Europeanists and have the e¡ect of isolating European studies from the political-science mainstream in International Relations and Comparative Politics. These
di¤culties are bound to continue as long as researchers keep proposing holistic concepts that claim to represent the complex reality of the European polity as a whole. It is suggested that the present competition among poorly ¢tting and contested generalizations could be overcome if
European studies made use of a plurality of simpler and complementary concepts, each of which is meant to represent the speci¢c characteristics of certain subsets of multilevel interactions - which could also be applied and tested in other ¢elds of political-science research.
Four distinct modes of multilevel interaction in the European polity are described ^ `mutual adjustment', `intergovernmental negotiations', `joint-decision making', and `hierarchical direction' - and their characteristics are discussed by reference to the criteria of problem-
solving capacity and institutional legitimacy.
