Hie EU still awaits its Madison... capable of combining normative and practical considerations in equal measure. However, a Publias needs an audience and a context that only normative debate about the EU is likely to create.Bellamy and Castiglione (1999)The increasingly overwhelming literature on European integration theory still leaves much to be desired from a meta-theoretical perspective, i.e. from the standpoint of both the theory of a fast-growing corpus of regional integration and the study of the discipline concerned using the language of normative discourse. In retrospect, though, it was mainly through the expla- nations as well as analytical and methodological insights offered by the various state-centric and Euro-centric approaches to the integration process that it was hoped to develop a greater and deeper understanding of the structural arrangements, behavioural characteristics and operational dynamics of the European Union (EU). This article, by putting forward the foundations of a meta-theoretical research agenda, claims mat the time has come for a certain type of meta-analysis to be applied to the study of the EU system and in particular to what is increasingly referred to as 'the emerging European polity'.