Unlike previous steps in West European integration, the Treaty of Maastricht contains hardly any of the liberal elements which had so far kept the centralizing and bureaucratic features of the EC in check. The treaty embodies a vision of a uniform EC, to be modelled along the lines of an...

This paper introduces a new theoretical framework of international unions qua coalitions of countries adopting a common policy and common supranational institutions. We introduce a general class of non-cooperative spatial bargaining games of coalition formation among three countries in order to...

From a pure welfare economic viewpoint, there is no contradiction between a deepening and a widening of the EU. However, the analysis in this paper shows that the factual degree of deepening efforts within the EU by far exceeds the economically optimal one. Above all, the tendency of the...