Pioneers of european integration: An introduction

The European Union stands as a unique economic, political, legal and social experiment in transnational regional integration. The world we live in may still be one primarily organized by and for territorial nation states, but if one empirical example is to be sought of how a post-national or cosmopolitan polity and society might be built, the EU is the only actually existing institutional example. Built on a regional territorial logic, its complex structures are also the best guide to the way a progressive and governable political order might be constructed from the economic free-for-all of globalisation. In no other part of the world have sovereign nation states bonded together to voluntarily relinquish large aspects of their sovereign control of economy and polity to a set of common supranational institutions. And in no other part of the world have such institutions created a form of post-national citizenship within a transnational regional political order.