Monitoring and (Good) Governance of the Integration Process in the European Union

This chapter looks at the extent to which monitoring processes and activities provide theintegration in the European Union (EU) with sufficient levels of transparency andaccountability to make it the relatively well-governed, deep and sustainable process as itis generally perceived to be. This is a usually neglected aspect of European integration.The chapter attempts to show that the complexity of the integration scheme is –to animportant extent- matched by or – at least – accompanied by a complex monitoringsystem. Looking at EU integration through the lens of monitoring actors and actions,reveals also the specificity of the whole integration project and hints at the underlyingpolitical culture and historically determined societal equilibria in Europe. This way, thechapter will inform the new social constructionist approaches to regional integration(Duina 2006). At the same time, we will also discuss the more technical aspects of(good) monitoring of regional integration.After a brief panoramic view of the state of (institutionalized) integration in the EU(section 2), and a sketch of our conceptual framework (section 3.1), the subsequentsections discuss the different forms and modalities of monitoring in the EU, and theactors involved. Both internal (section 4) and external monitoring (section 5) will bediscussed. Section 6 concludes.