How legitimate are the EU's treaty revision procedures, that is, IGCs and the Convention? Since the rejection of the Constitutional Treaty the recurrence to intergovernmental procedures appears as one way out of the current dilemma. We argue instead that the Convention method is not to blame for the current crisis. On the contrary, it increases the legitimacy of EU constitutionalization considerably.

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According to principal-agent theory, states (the principals) delegate the implementation of a legalized agreement to an international organization (the agent). The conventional wisdom about states’ capacity to control international organizations is that differences among the member states impede control and consequently enhance the agent's autonomy, whereas agreement allows for effective control and limited autonomy. Contrary to this conventional wisdom, this article argues that conflicts among states need not always impede effective control. On the contrary: if an international organization comprises a sufficient number of policies, there are gains from the exchange of control over its portfolios that are of special sensitivity to different member states. As a result, international organizations exhibit informal spheres of national control, or national fiefdoms. The article demonstrates the theory's plausibility using the example of the European Union and other international organizations. It has implications for the literature on delegation and informal governance.

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This introduction sets the stage for a special issue devoted to evaluating the contribution and continued relevance of Liberal Intergovernmentalism (LI) – a theory first formulated 25 years ago in this journal – in today's politicized and crisis‐ridden European Union (EU). We review the debates prompted by LI's three core claims about national preference formation, intergovernmental bargaining and institutional choice, as well as by the theory's three policy‐relevant corollaries relating to the EU's democratic deficit, its constitutional settlement and its role in the world. Liberal intergovernmentalism, we argue, remains highly relevant in today's EU, offering important insights and serving to structure much of the academic debate about the prospects of the Union in a time of crisis. Nevertheless, a revitalized LI faces the dual challenges of theorizing both the causes and consequences of mass politicization of EU politics, as well as the prospect of endogenous change in the direction of greater integration or disintegration.