Which institutions for post-war Europe? Explaining the institutional design of Europe's first community

This article addresses a question that has been vastly ignored by the political science community and the literature on institutional/constitutional choice and delegation in European politics in particular: why is the European Union governed by a specific set of institutions comprising a Commission, Parliament, Court and Council of Ministers? By linking member states' preferences for cooperation to their preferences for institutions, this article provides an explanation of why the six founding members of the European Coal and Steel Community opted for a particular institutional set-up that included elements novel to the practice and study of international co-operation, i.e. supranationality and a nascent form of popular representation. It will be argued that the states' underlying economic and status- or security-related preferences for co-operation correlate with different rationales for institution-building. With regard to economic preferences, the logic of institution-building will follow instrumental calculations about the expected distributional consequences of institutional arrangements whereas status- or security-related preferences correlate with considerations of 'appropriateness' given uncertainty about the distributive implications of institutions. This article will therefore show that norm-driven and methodological individualist approaches to explain institution-building need not be mutually exclusive but can be considered as complementary.