evelopment.The EU is a Dynamic Multi-level System. Not only in political science but also in legal science, sociology and economics basic concepts and theories rely on a traditional concept of the state. In this reasoning, there are national political systems which take the form of a universally competent state as a powerful central organ on the one hand and international relations taking place in the absence of central authority on the other hand; there is public law on the one hand and public international law or private international law governing the collisions of domestic legal systems on the other hand; there is national society as the level of social integration and world society as the level of system integration; there are national economies which allow for an intentionally created order on the one hand and the world market which is governed at best by spontaneous order on the other hand. If already by the choice of fundamental theoretical notions the member states on the one hand and the European Union on the other hand are considered as two separate political systems which are only linked by the Council of Ministers, changes in this system easily disappear from our view. As a consequence, analytical models of the integration process consider the question of whether it overcomes or strengthens the nation-states, as the most important issue of integration research (Morav?k 1994). From this perspective, political discourse and actual European policy-making are often perceived as a dramatic fight between these two poles in which the respective players more or less succeed to push the reality of European integration in one of these two directions. This zero-sum logic misses the essence of the integration process and almost fifty years after the creation of the first European institution it makes less and less sense to understand and judge the European Union by reference to one of these two ideal models. One possibility to deal wit...
