Introduction

It is our contention that, today, all relevant political actors – state actors, political parties, interest associations, and social movement organizations – face a double strategic challenge as a result of two crucial transformations of their political opportunity structure – the Europeanization of politics and the increasing public orientation of politics. Both of these processes have already been discussed (see Chapters 1 and 2). For this chapter, it is crucially important to understand that the process of European integration has led to the creation of a polity of an unprecedented kind – a system of multilevel governance that encompasses a variety of authoritative institutions at supranational, national, and subnational levels of decision making. Following the work of some influential political scientists (Green Cowles, Caporaso, and Risse 2001; Hooghe and Marks 2001; Jachtenfuchs and Kohler-Koch 2003), we view the EU as a distinct structure of governance with characteristics of its own. The development of this EU polity has gone hand-in-hand with the widening scope of decision making and its public politicization at the supranational level. The precise nature of the very complex political structuring of the decision-making processes within this new polity is rather unclear and leaves much room for interpretation. We do not want to enter the debate on the architecture of this structuring, but we would like to consider its implications for the strategic orientation of collective political actors' action repertoires. For these actors, the emergence of the new supranational layer of decision making at the EU level implies a transformation of their political opportunity structure, which represents a new resource or constraint and complicates their matrix of strategic choices (see also Chapter 4).