This book appears in Oxford University Press’s first-rate Transformations in Governance series, edited by Liesbet Hooghe, Gary Marks, and Walter Mattli. Michaël Tatham seeks to make an original contribution to literatures on “new territorial order,” Europeanization, and multilevel governance by exploring how substate entities—such as the German Länder, Belgian regions, or devolved British regions—interact with their respective member states as they pursue their own interests in European Union policymaking. Do they cooperate, fall into conflict with national capitals, or lobby in Brussels without interacting with their home government? Tatham succeeds in making a truly novel contribution to our knowledge of an important element of the Brussels game by drawing on both original quantitative and qualitative data sets and an exhaustive reading of the research literature. The book is (mostly) well written and gives us a window into an area at the confluence of EU policymaking, government-to-government interactions in federal (or quasi-federal) systems, and lobbying in Brussels about which there are still multiple gaps in our knowledge.

Tatham’s findings are often counterintuitive. His evidence strongly suggests that cooperation between state and substate units is the most frequent outcome, with noninteraction a second most common result, and conflict relatively rare. Perhaps surprisingly, “levels” of devolution (how much power is actually devolved to subnational units) do not correlate with increased conflict. In fact, “the higher the level of devolution of powers, the greater the cooperation between state and sub-state levels” (p. 13). Why? “[B]y creating more resourceful, powerful and involved players, devolution also increases the overlap of competences and interests between state and [subnational actors] . . . and hence the incentive to cooperate in the highly competitive but also interdependent polity that the Brussels village is” (p. 270). This finding has important, practical policy implications: “[C]entral governments can continue to devolve powers at home without fearing that they are undermining themselves abroad” (p. 270). Advocates of the multilevel governance framework (not least Hooghe and Marks) note that nearly every European state has decentralized power over the course of decades. This fact is at the heart of attempts to theorize about how governance now works in Europe. Tatham thus has made a genuinely original contribution to scholarship about both the empirical and theoretical effects on an important “slice” of that governance: that which occurs at the EU level.

Party political disjuncture—with, say, the Westminster government in the United Kingdom controlled by Conservatives, and the devolved Scottish government in the hands of the Scottish National Party—generally reduces cooperation and makes simple noninteraction more likely. Put simply, “the effect of devolution largely overrides that of party politics” (p. 269). But different parties in power in different political capitals of the same EU member state do not often lead to outright conflict in how they lobby in Brussels. Central governments and devolved authorities usually (again) have overlapping, if not identical, interests when EU policy is mooted, negotiated, or made. Even if national capitals do not coordinate their lobbying efforts, they each probably keep an eye on what position(s) the other is pushing on the Brussels machine. And the EU being what it is—everybody talks to everybody in Brussels—it is rarely difficult to work out what other lobbyists are asking for.

What does lead to conflict is less clear from the book’s findings. But Tatham’s hunch is that it is probably “resource-richness”: When subnational units have a lot of wealth and resources, they are more likely to clash with their national government. His tentative conclusion is that his “research has to modestly conclude that greater sub-state GDP per capita increases conflicting interest representation” (p. 269).

Tatham has clearly done the legwork to come up with these findings. He uses mixed methods admirably, surveying subnational lobbying offices in Brussels, conducting more than a hundred semistructured interviews with both lobbyists and those lobbied, and offering interesting case studies in the book’s middle chapters on how British, French, and Austrian national and subnational entities interact. He offers an unusually empirically rich analysis, sizes up the theoretical implications of his findings, and avoids any claims that he cannot definitively support with his evidence. This book, the author’s first, has had input from the cream of the EU scholars’ crop along the way during his stops at Oxford, Grenoble, Konstanz, and Florence (see pp. v–vii). No one could argue that Tatham has not produced an impressive, well-researched and truly scientific piece of work.

It is also not without flaws. The author seems not to have thought much about his reader—particularly his curious but non-EU specialized reader—when writing and presenting the book. It thus fits uncomfortably with the ambition of Oxford’s Governance series to reach those working in “comparative politics, international relations, public policy, federalism, and environmental and urban studies” who are focused on how “the dispersion of authority” from states both to the EU above and subunits below complexifies governance. A lot of the book’s visuals—particularly in Chapter 3 (“Paradiplomacy with Adjectives?”)—will glaze the eye of all but the most quantitatively oriented scholar. Few readers will find the numbering of sections in the most rigid format possible (3.3.3.3., p. 92; 5.2.2.3, p. 157) anything but ugly on the eye. There is an occasional tendency to grab-bag without explanation the variables found in previous research on the EU to have determined outcomes: “treaty rules and procedures, path-dependent practices and behaviors, configuration of actor constellations, unintended consequences, and principal-agent relations” (p. 1). The result is that a very well evidenced and important piece of social scientific research may not find the audience it deserves. None of us thinks enough of our reader(s): We are all self-centered and usually write in a “let me tell you what I know” mode, as opposed to one who carefully calculates how our evidence and argument are best presented to convince our reader—even a nonspecialist one—that our findings and argument(s) are sound.

In any event, Tatham deserves whatever audience his book does get for this very thoughtful and impressively researched piece of work. We all have to look for ways to improve on our past performance as social scientists, no matter our career stage, and—after all—With, Without, or Against the State? is Tatham’s first book. He has plenty of time and space. It is hard to resist the final judgment that Tatham has not quite delivered on his promise here. But there are more times to come and a lot still to which we can look forward.