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As the European Union democratizes and expands, will its basic institutions remain fundamentally intact or will the member states dramatically reshape the Union in a new grand bargain, overthrowing the existing system? Any answer to this question will necessarily rest on assumptions about the nature of institutional continuity and change that cannot be addressed by looking at the history of European institutions alone. Comparative cases of confederal systems are a methodological necessity. Australian integration in the late 19th century is a potentially useful comparative case. I develop a theory of stasis and change in international organizations that suggests that democratization and unbalanced expansion each can lead member states in an organization to scrap their institutions entirely and start from scratch. Likely developments in the near-term future of the EU raise the possibility of big changes soon. Updates and additional papers available at http://home.gwu.edu/~rector [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses Europe?s strategic choices in climate governance between the United States and Australia, on the one hand, and the major developing countries on the other. It argues that the future climate governance architecture must pass four tests: credibility, stability, flexibility, and inclusiveness. Drawing on this, I review the strategic choices for Europe, structured around three levels of analysis in political science: climate polity, that is, the larger institutional and legal context of policy-making; climate policy, the instruments and targets that governments agree to implement; and climate politics, the actual negotiation process. At each level of analysis, I look at the interests and expectations of two non-European actors or actor groups: the United States, which accounts for over a third of all Northern greenhouse gas emissions, and the group of developing countries, which accounts for the vast majority of humankind. I argue that Europe must take clear principled positions on a number of key issues, in particular the need to have a strong multilateral framework as the sole and core institutional setting for climate policy and to accept the principle of equal per-capita emissions entitlements as the long-term normative bedrock of global climate governance. Both positions, however, will alienate the United States, and both will make it more difficult for the United States to rejoin the international community on the climate issue. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]