Paper Titles & Abstracts

This paper argues that EU integration is not simply a matter of preferences. While some liberal intergovernmentalists frame EU integration as an equilibrium in a repeated game played by egoistic actors, I argue here that it is wrong to assume that EU actors only care about their own payoffs. In fact, the resilience of the EU integration project depends upon its ability to accommodate, essentially, two kinds of actors: self-interested and conditional cooperators. While self-interested players have often occupied the centre of analysis, conditional cooperators or strong reciprocators have not yet received the attention they deserve. The paper discusses the characteristic traits of strong reciprocators and investigates the extent to which they enable us to determine the conditions under which Member States sometimes resort to flexible integration.