Which Europe? Conflicting models of a legitimate European political order

Conflicts over the shape of the European Union are usually modelled as conf licts of interests. This article argues that the development of a polity de pends not only on interests but also on normative ideas about a legitimate political order ('polity-ideas'). These polity-ideas are extremely stable o ver time and resistant to change because they are linked to the identity an d basic normative orientations of the actors involved. The article has four parts: (1) a theoretical argument how to link ideas and polity development in the EU, (2) a methodological discussion containing four ideal-typical p olity-ideas about the EU, (3) a comparative analysis of the development of these ideas in France, Germany and the United Kingdom from 1950 to 1995, an d (4) a summary of the empirical findings and a discussion of areas of rese arch for which the theoretical approach and the empirical results presented here might be useful.