This instrument-oriented research has been focused mainly on ‘new’ instruments and directed at the debate about ‘new governance’ or ‘new’ modes of governance. This literature developed in the early late 1990s and early 2000s in response to the series of EU initiative launched with the declared intention of transforming EU governance and giving integration a new dynamic, despite the grow- ing influence of the member states. As is usually the case, they did not produce the results that were anticipated, but they did attract considerable scholarly attention, with authors excited by innovation, new modes of governance and the functioning of a ‘new’ enlarged Europe in the ‘new’ millennium.