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WORLD VIEW:WINNERS AND losers. These terms are often avoided in analyses of European integration on the grounds that it is better understood as a win-win than a zero-sum process. Efficient rather than redistributive outcomes are best pursued by regulatory policies, ensuring everyone gains – or at least if some benefit others are not made worse off.

This account is more convincing about the time when the EU’s basic institutional and political structures were being created from the 1960s to the 1990s, than in the last 15 years when the project has become more political – and contested. While many of its policies and competences remain broadly regulatory rather than redistributive, their growing impact on EU member states are better imagined as a continuum than as alternatives. Thus food safety would be at one end, market regulation somewhere in the middle and spending policies on agriculture, regions or social protection at the other.