European Integration beyond the Normative View: Fluidity and Uncertainty as a “Norm”

The article criticizes the normative – political and theoretical – approach to the EU. It analyses the paradoxes of the political constitution of the EU, processes of contradictions and fluidity of institutional structures, representative of both EU and new member states. The author poses the question of the paradigm, which could explain such processes and offers the entangled modernities approach. From this point of view, hybridity, constant change, fluidity are not the expression of a crisis, but of a new type of contextual and dynamic institutionalism, which could be more adequate to the uncertain environment than the adherence to classical rigid structures. It would be sensible for the EU and the member states to operate in a permanent dialogue regime; negotiation and renegotiation should become a fundamental principle of the functioning of the EU.