In order to gain influence in a Principality, the skill of gaining familiarity with its court, dignitaries and officials is crucial. This old wisdom of Machiavelli (Prince, chapter 7) is also true for the EU, where nobody can score without intimate knowledge and information about how decisions are made. Like in the old courts, its internal ‘flesh-and-blood’ can be much different from its formal ‘skeleton’. How does the EU work?

I Deus Ex Machina

The basic principle of EU integration is that every EU decision that is based on competences and procedures agreed upon by treaty text, legally binds the member states and overrules the domestic laws and acts that are not in accordance with it. The principle works, however, in a more complex way because, due to the various treaties and their differentiations, more than one legal EU order exists [Avbelj, 2011], each with a division of competences between EU and member states. Potential conflicts between them are solved by the Court and ultimately by modifying a treaty. The principle is most crucial for EU integration, as the about 2,500 new decisions produced annually would otherwise remain just on paper. As main place of production, Brussels can hence be called the capital of the member states. The interest groups wanting to influence the outputs of the EU machinery must possess useful (valid, reliable and applicable) knowledge of how they come into being [Lindblom and Cohen, 1979]. Otherwise an interest group cannot effectively influence the authorities and officials inside. This chapter is a crash course on the workings of the EU machinery. What sort of machinery is the EU? Three basic characteristics we emphasize.