352 pp., $95.00 hardcover.

In 1972, Walter Hallstein, a founding father of the European Union and the first president of the Commission, described the (then) European Community in his memoirs, noting that the human understanding more easily invents new things than new words, and we are thence constrained to employ a multitude of improper and in-adequate expressions... a form of government has been found out which is neither exactly national nor Federal; but no further progress has been made and the new word which will one day designate this novel invention does not exist. (Hallstein 1972, 38) The words were not Hallstein’s own, but rather Alexis de Tocqueville’s 1835 description of the United States. Hallstein’s choice of comparator was apt, and Robert Schütze opens his impressive book in the same spirit, by arguing that the European Union (EU) should be viewed as a species of federation. He describes the American federal tradition as a mixture of both the classic, internationalist vision of (con)federation and the nation-state oriented view of the ‘‘federal State’ ’ as a decentralized unitary State. And he concludes that, when viewed through a functional Madisonian lens, the foundational, institutional, and substantive dimensions of the EU present this mixed, or ‘‘middle,’ ’ federal ground, in clear resonance with the United States. Schütze challenges the European fixation on undivided sovereignty that structures the ‘‘national’ ’ understanding of federation, and by design his definition of federation sits somewhat uneasily in the European federal literature [mirroring in some ways Michael Burgess’s efforts to describe the EU as a ‘‘new confederation.’ ’ (Burgess 2000)]. Schütze’s is a deeply theorized analysis, but using federalism to challenge accounts of the EU as sui generis is a more conventional approach than he acknowledges. (His bibliography does not include, for example, Nicolaidis an