EU & NAFTA: An Introduction
The foundation of inter-systemic comparisons was the research that contrasted the evolving European Community with one or other of the federations in North America. To the extent that they focused on the United States of America, these explorations resembled the problem of comparing an apple (albeit a huge apple) with a bunch of grapes. In some fields such as anti-trust (Bodoff, 1984) or agriculture(Skogstad, 1998) where policy-making at the European level is almost as coherent as at the federal level in the US, comparison had significant academic value. In others such as federalism, the USA offered more a vision for a United States of Europe towards which some of the dreamier Europhiles aspired than a government similar enough to allow successful comparative analysis. Definite limits inhibited the exercise of setting a highly homogenous, if federal, superpower against a quite poorly integrated grouping of various sovereign states, which still claimed separate currencies, distinct cultures, different policy processes, and dissimilar legal systems. On account of their high degrees of centralization, neither US nor Mexican federalism could yield deep insight as a matrix for studying an EC which operates supranational (civil servants in the European Commission or judges in the European Court of Justice owing their loyalty only to the continental regime), inter-governmentally (national politicians defending their country's interests in the Council of Ministers), infra-nationally (state civil servants developing a common culture with their counterparts from other member states in Brussels' labyrinthian comitology), transnationally (interest groups, lobbies, unions, and fledgling parties operating at the pan-European level), but not democratically in the sense that a directly elected legislature and executive are responsible for making the community's laws. This is not to dispute that the American system is without relevance to European scholarship. In contrast, it remains so powerful an......
