Alive and kicking or barely alive? The asymmetry thesis in the twenty-first century EU

This paper focuses on the legal and institutional assumptions of Fritz Scharpf's famous thesis of an asymmetry between positive and negative integration in the EU. Taking issue with a number of arguments forwarded in the lead piece for this debate section, it questions the relevance of the thesis to the governance of the contemporary EU, objecting to (i) the limited falsifiability of the asymmetry thesis as established by the distinction between structure and agency; (ii) the emphasis of the thesis on the weakening influence of negative integration and (iii) the way in which asymmetry ignores the increasing centrality of positive integration to defining the EU's legal order. As the paper concludes, while the asymmetry thesis pioneered inter-disciplinary exploration of how the EU's legal and political order inter-relates, it needs serious re-thinking in the Europe of the 2020s.