"Reassessing Regimes: the International Regime Aspects of the European Community"

[From the Introduction]. The theoretical study of the European Community has traditionally been undertaken according to theories of international integration. After all, the EC is the result of the economic integration or unification of sovereign nationstates, and integration theory has been developed to explain the process and end-state of such unification. More recently, however, scholars have written that integration theory is no longer useful for studying the creature into which the EC has evolved, and into which the Community is still evolving (see, for example, Pinder, 1981; Hoffman, 1982; Wallace, 1982, 1983). This development has led to an increasing amount of scholarly work on what type of institution best describes the EC, and therefore what theoretical framework best explains the EC at its current stage of development. In this paper, I will briefly describe two basic conceptualizations of what type of institution the EC is: international organization and confederation. Then I will argue that, regardless of what type of institution the EC is, there is a regime associated with it. Finally, I will outline the regime aspects of the Community