This paper focuses on the European Security and Defense Policy and tries to answer the question why the member states have deviating deepening preferences in this field. After discovering the supranational-intergovernmental divide, we will determine its possible causes. The Qualitative Comparative Analysis helps us to distillate the most valuable independent variables and reveals ‘institutional culture’ and ‘balancing’ as most important. Finally, we match our findings with the initial theories, used to derive the causal variables, and verify their explanatory power.

This article investigates the cross-national prevalence of five news frames in quality papers’ coverage of the Treaty of Lisbon (EU Constitution). Three frames were identified in earlier studies: economic consequences, conflict, and human interest. Two additional frames were identified and composed: power and nationalization. During the seven-month period leading up to the signing of the Treaty of Lisbon (December 2007), we analyzed 341 articles from four quality papers: Le Monde (France), De Volkskrant (The Netherlands), De Standaard (Dutch speaking community of Belgium), and Le Soir (French speaking community of Belgium). Our results show that although significant differences between newspapers were found in the amount of framing, overall they reflected a similar pattern in the adoption of the news frames. The economic consequences frame, followed by the power frame, appeared most prominently in all of the newspapers’ coverage. However, the conflict and nationalization frames recurred in a significantly lesser degree. These findings indicate that the meaning behind the Treaty of Lisbon as a symbol of supra-national unity could have led to a shift from a domesticated, conflict oriented coverage as found in previous studies to a more unified portrayal of the EU within and between the quality papers under study.

This article presents an analytical framework to advance the comparative study of regional integration processes and to give a proper place to the EU within the field of regional integration studies. It is argued that a single theory of regional integration is not possible and that in order to compare different integration processes a distinction needs to be made between three generations of regionalism: i) integration by removing (economic) barriers; ii) integration by building a supranational structure and (iii) integration by building a geopolitical identity. This framework allows to better situate the EU towards other integration schemes in the world: as an exponent of first generation regionalism, the EU can be studied as one of many hundreds integration schemes; as a form of second generation integration the EU can only be compared to a limited number of cases and with regard to third generation regionalism the EU is a N = 1 case.