EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Britain and the Negotiation of the Maastricht Treaty: A Critique of Liberal Intergovernmentalism

Anthony Forster

Journal of Common Market Studies, 1998, vol. 36, issue 3, 347-368

Abstract: This article critically examines the liberal intergovernmental (LI) approach to bargaining in the European Union. It explores its analytical and predictive power in relation to the British negotiation of three dossiers in the 1991 Intergovernmental Conference (IGC) on Political Union: social policy, foreign and security policy and enhancing the powers of the European Parliament (EP). It casts doubt on the LI explanation of national preference formation and contends that there are three weaknesses of the LI approach: the notion of preference formation; the assumption that governments are purposeful and instrumental actors; and the liberal intergovernmental conception of bargaining. More generally, the article casts doubt on the value of LI claims to explanatory as well as predictive value.

Date: 1998
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-5965.00114

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:jcmkts:v:36:y:1998:i:3:p:347-368

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0021-9886

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Common Market Studies is currently edited by Jim Rollo and Daniel Wincott

More articles in Journal of Common Market Studies from Wiley Blackwell
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:bla:jcmkts:v:36:y:1998:i:3:p:347-368