In the late nineteenth century – an age when the phrase “all politics is local” contained even greater truth than it does today – the distinctive institution of urban public life was the political machine. In assessing the machine's importance, some scholars have emphasized the machine's role in integrating newly arrived immigrants into the American political system, its provision of basic material goods to the impoverished, its promotion of upward mobility of immigrants, and its coordination of a socially and politically fragmented city. Other scholars have focused on the long-range effect of the political machine on American politics and policy, arguing that the cross-class coalitions built by machine politicians muted the development of a politicized working class in the United States. Some extend this causal chain, arguing that the lack of a stronger class-based politics produced in turn the relative weakness of the American welfare state compared to other Western democracies.

Conventional wisdom states that where ideas and values have mattered in American political life they have usually been the product of a single, overarching political culture. The United States, it is argued, has had political conflict but not ideological conflict. Perhaps nowhere is this premise more noticeable than in the study of political parties. According to Du-verger, “[T]he two parties are rival teams, one occupying office, the other seeking to dislodge it. It is a struggle between the ins and the outs, which never becomes fanatical, and creates no deep cleavage in the country.” Everett Carll Ladd writes, “[T]he need to seek support within an overarching ideological consensus, has historically imposed certain characteristics on the major American parties – social group inclusiveness, accommodationism, a ‘non-ideological’ stance vis-a-vis their principal opponents (which, after all, accept the same ideology).”

Over the past few decades, historians engaged in the study of American Populism have advanced a number of conflicting interpretations of the last great protest movement of the nineteenth century. Among the most influential representations of Populism have been the following: Populists as reactionary and vaguely anti-Semitic predecessors of American fascism, as agrarian romantics nostalgically clinging to the Jeffersonian ideal of the independent yeoman, as modern reformers embracing an American version of social democracy, as agrarian republicans aiming to build a cooperative commonwealth on the basis of mutuality, and as true radicals offering the final challenge to the rise of corporate capitalism in America. Although no final agreement on the true nature of Populism has been achieved, despite the impressive scholarly output that has made the study of Populism into a minor cottage industry among historians, there has been a powerful trend toward a renewed appreciation of the radical character of Populist protest. In challenging the dominance of the two major parties and in advocating a comprehensive program of economic and social reform, American Populists are widely regarded as reflecting a ground swell of opposition to corporate America. With the demise of Populism after the disastrous election of 1896, the hopes for building a radically different America faded.

These quotes point to a puzzle, the puzzle with which this study begins: Within the past forty years, national member-states not only accepted the interpretive authority of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) as the supreme decision maker for conflicts between member-state authority and central federal authority of the European Community (since 1994, the European Union) but also accepted this court's dictates that the treaties forming the community had constitutional status as supreme law in every member state and that European-level law had higher law status within every member state, superseding any national law to the contrary. Indeed, European member-state acceptance of this development advanced much more rapidly than state acceptance of the U.S. Supreme Court in its first several decades. Yet this pattern of respective acceptance of central federal authority runs counter to prevailing understandings of sovereignty.