Book excerpt: This book examines regulatory capacity beyond the nation state. It suggests that we can only understand why EU agencies are able to build EU regulatory capacity if we acknowledge that national regulators provide their expertise, staff and resources to the regulatory processes taking place in these EU bodies. This raises the puzzle of why national regulators are willing to provide ‘life support’ to potentially rival organisations. The book is devoted to answering this question in order to understand how EU regulatory capacity is created in the absence of a full supranational regulatory bureaucracy. To do so, the book studies to what extent national regulators from two countries (the UK and Germany) support EU agencies in their work across four policy sectors (drug safety, food safety, maritime safety and banking supervision). The book makes a significant contribution by developing a bureaucratic politics perspective that highlights the importance of national regulators for EU regulatory capacity building.