The Lisbon Treaty represented the last attempt to keep alternative views on the EU within the same legal and institutional framework, formalizing the coexistence of supranational union with parliamentary features, intergovernmental union (federation of national governments) and economic community. The first two are political, the third exclusively economic. The paper discusses those different visions, conceptualizing the institutional logic underpinning each. Focus is on horizontal (inter-institutional relations concerning legislative and executive) functions. The euro crisis shows the difficulty of keeping those different views within the same legal order and their normative insufficiency. If the distance between the no euro-area member states (supporters of the economic community’s view) and the euro-area member states has increased, the political views of integration (parliamentary and intergovernmental unions) have no persuasive institutional strategy for building a political union for the euro-area. An alternative institutional project is presented - compound union - whose implementation requires Treaty change.
