ASTK12168U Theorizing European Integration

The European Union (EU) poses a number of challenges for scholars of politics and international relations. It is easy enough to agree that the EU is important in both European and global politics. It is rather more of a problem to agree on why it is important. Some scholars insist that the EU offers a unique and transformative experiment in post-national governance, with neither historical precedent nor contemporary parallel. If this is so, then we need to devise novel and creative ways to think about – to theorize – this phenomenon. On the other hand, social scientists generally prefer to think about objects of study in terms of established modes of analysis and theoretical toolkits. The inclination in this case is to ask of the EU: ‘of what is this an instance?’ This course grapples with this tension by exploring the different ways in which scholarship in political science and international relations has confronted and theorised the EU. We will be thinking about both the EU and its evolution and the limits and possibilities of political science/IR past and present.

The course commences with consideration of two foundational themes that will inform our deliberations throughout the semester: the role of theory in the study of the EU and the rather complicated question of how we define the EU/European integration. We then proceed chronologically and thematically by laying out the different encounters between the theory and practice of international integration in Europe. We consider early attempts – from the late 18th century – to think about the problems of and prospects for post-nationalism, before examining the early attempts of political scientists to explore the emerging institutional forms of European integration from the 1950s. This leads us to the supposed ‘great debate’ between ‘neofunctionalist’ and ‘intergovernmentalist’ accounts of integration. This much discussed debate has also been extensively criticised and we look at alternative ways of thinking about the EU in more recent times, most notably from the domains of political science and policy analysis. We examine the ways in which contemporary International Relations scholarship encounters the EU – especially as the EU has become a more obvious player/actor in the field of world politics. For many working in EU studies at present, the key cleavage is between rationalist and constructivist approaches. We will examine the usefulness of this division, which has also been used as a way of identifying the main fault lines in contemporary IR, and look at examples of each approach. We will also think about the so-called ‘normative turn’ in EU studies – the emergence of a political philosophy of European integration especially concerned with questions of legitimacy, democracy, citizenship and constitutionalism. We conclude by examining approaches from beyond the mainstream, such as post-structuralism and feminism and asking whether a broader encounter with other social sciences would open up a more productive theoretical frontier in EU studies.