The simple point is that EU studies - like any other area of enquiry - merits a 'sociology of knowledge' treatment. Its premise revolves around a basic claim about the importance of knowledge generation as a social process like any other. This means, in simple terms, that our evaluation of academic work cannot be targeted solely upon its capacity or otherwise to conform to the real world.
This issue of theoretical evaluation touches upon the question of how EU studies has developed as a field of enquiry. As Ole Waever notes, the intellectual evolution of a field is often thought of as being closely tied to developments within the object of study. Thus it might be argued that the trajectory of EU studies in general its theoretical repertoire in particular is a function of the changing nature of the EU over time.
So to pick out some random examples, neofunctionalism might be read as an intellectual expression of the strategies employed by European elites that were contrast between political science and economics in the UK is that the norms that specify the highest standards of professional practice are much more embedded in the latter.
This may be correct, but the point is that the monist advocates described above tend to seek naturalistic standards and see normative value in a Kuhnian model of scientific development. Similarly, the appearance of intergovernmental critiques and the collapse of the neofunctionalist project appear to be reactions to the growing visibility of national executives and intergovernmental institutional expressions in the Community system from the mids.
The increasing tendency of current literature to conceptualise the EU as a political system can be traced to the obvious salience of the EU as a supplier of authoritative outputs and the attendant complexity of the multi-actor policy process that surrounds the EU's institutions. Finally the rapid recent growth of studies of the external dimensions of European integration may seem an obvious consequence of a the growth of a foreign, security and defence policy agenda, b the emerging status of the Euro as an alternative reserve currency and c the widening issue base of international trade that has forced issues of European integration such as the Common Agricultural Policy onto the agenda of the WTO.
Following Wsever , there are two variants of such a position. The first celebrates this process as a sign of disciplinary progress in which EU studies has drawn valuable lessons from its object of study though a process of intellectual 'catch-up'. From this stance, it is imperative that EU studies remains an academic expression of the 'real world' of European integration and EU governance. Therefore, approaches to the EU that no longer 'fit' their object are candidates for disposal, although there may be cases where reinstatement is merited if the tide of integration shifts back in the direction of certain perspectives.
Here scholarship is interrogated for its potential to act as the intellectual legitimation of particular ideologies associated with the object. A good example from EU studies is to be found in Milward and S0rensen's energetic critique of neofunctionalism, where the latter is portrayed as both a a Cold War theory offering an intellectual justification for US foreign policy priorities of the s and b an attractive set of categories for the emerging supranational European elite to deploy in defence of their claims for the growth of Community-level governance capacity Milward and S0rensen, Another example might be found in Alex Warleigh's call for a 5 The alternative is to think about the intellectual history of a field in terms of explanations that are primarily internal to that field.
Wasver maintains that 'external explanations can sometimes So institutionalist approaches may appear to sit well with the broad treaty-induced pattern of EU politics, but this cannot explain why rational choice institutionalism for example has been applied so readily to the EU and why rationalist epistemologies are claimed to offer the basis for a coherent research programme that brings together the various insights of the three institutionalisms Schneider and Aspinwall, This paper adopts this 'internalist' stance, not least because the object of study and the categories that we impose upon it are at least in part interpreted, constructed and defined by the field.
They are not purely exogenous to the field. Steve Smith takes this point a little further by arguing that the application of 'rationalist' theory to European integration 'far from being the explanatory theory that it claims to be, instead provides a political and normative account of European integration whereby positivist notions of how to explain a given "reality" in fact constitute the reality of European integration' a: This position also reminds us that our knowledge about the world is produced amidst broad scientific and more specific disciplinary structures, norms, practices and institutions.
These in turn relate in complex ways to broader social and political practices. This requires, therefore, that we historicise and contextualise our discussions about knowledge production. To think otherwise - to reify science in other words - is simply to discount the status of academic work as a social activity.
Wagner, Wittrock and Whitley, ; Whitley, and leads us to rather sterile accounts of disciplinary history. If nothing else, the fact that many scholars of the EU work within the US political science community means that EU studies is - partially - exposed to the tensions described at the beginning of this paper.
As discussed below, for a variety of reasons re-evaluation of the efficacy of Mitranian functionalism in light of debates about 'flexibility' in the EU 6 there are diminishing returns in being identified as an area studies specialist i.
Scholarship needs to have demonstrable disciplinary added value and, given the pathologies of the parent discipline, those working on the EU have multiple incentives to produce work of a particular type. The founding figures of integration theory were political scientists and claims about the legacies of the early theoretical jousts about European integration - more often than not cast in terms of a great debate between neofunctionalists and intergovernmentalists - usually form the starting point for contemporary theoretical interventions.
Many of these interventions seek to transcend or to go beyond what is claimed to be the hackneyed or outdated opposition between intergovernmentalists and neofunctionalists. For some notably Hix , , , this manoeuvre seeks explicitly to settle the status of 'political science' as the parent discipline for EU studies.
This in turn has two purposes. The first is the displacement of a supposed theoretical straight] acket in EU studies where International Relations paradigms have held sway within the sub-discipline. As is well known, Hix has argued that IR as a discipline is not capable of asking the most appropriate questions about the EU because the latter has developed into a mature political system.
The key questions about the EU, he claims, are classically Lasswellian and thus best handled by political science for critiques, see Hurrell and Menon, ; Rosamond, ch. The second claim about the value of political science is that such a move brings much needed rigour to EU studies. Employing the established tools of political science, runs the argument, challenges the excessively empiricist tendencies of much work on European integration.
Instead of dense, primitive description, the scrupulous qualities of good political science give social scientific purpose and thus greater direction to the discussion of EU politics Hix, In this account the move toward naturalism lends legitimacy to EU studies and raises its status within the political sciences because it raises the quality of the field.
Moreover, by making the key onto logical claim about the EU as a political system 'like any other' this moves firmly embeds 'legitimate' EU studies within the political science mainstream. This in turn Warleigh, ch. Moreover, to write off IR as a potential source of insight in EU studies for anything other than perhaps elaborating the structure of the international system within 7 refutes the notion that thinking beyond disciplinary orthodoxies to capture the nature of contemporary European transformations is a necessary or urgent task.
Such a claim devalues any position that begins with the idea that the EU represents something unfamiliar, such as a radical experiment in post-sovereign politics, for which established disciplinary discourses lack appropriate vocabulary. Such defences of the extant disciplinary status quo are, of course, perfectly arguable.
The problem with a position like this emerges when it is extended to the point where certain ontological claims and epistemological strategies are ruled inadmissible as valid 'science'.
This sort of argument is increasingly commonplace in EU studies. It is worth tabling some illustrative examples. In his discussion of Moravcsik's The Choice for Europe Moravcsik, , James Caporaso writes that This book helps to locate integration studies within the overall body of knowledge of international relations, comparative politics, and political science, and it takes EU studies out of its self-constructed theoretical ghetto.
The result may well be that students of integration will have to take more seriously the professional literatures of international relations, comparative politics and political economy.
Standards that apply in other sub-fields, for example, with regard to research design, data collection, and analysis, are more likely to extend to regional integration studies also. Caporaso, The claims to scientific status are also advanced by Moravcsik himself. Take this very definite - and not untypical - attempt to define what 'social science' is: I take the view of a social scientist.
Some group of scholars, I feel, needs to be responsible for analysing, correcting, and generalising our collective memory of significant events as objectively as possible For the social scientist, this means being, above all else, relentlessly self critical. The social scientist does this by employing explicit social scientific methods, that is, by clearly stating theories and hypotheses, the nature of alternative claims, and which the EU operates simply misunderstands many of the contemporary IR tendencies, concerns and debates.
For more discussion, see Wallace and Manners We should, he argues, be looking to generate findings that are replicable Moravcsik, a: - in the sense defined by Keohane King and Verba - that is to use methods that allow others to replicate the use of the data and trace the thread of logic that produces conclusions.
This is a typical instance of the claim that we need to formalise political science of the EU to conform to a particular type. By explicating the precise methodological, theoretical and empirical bases on which I reach conclusions, I have given potential critics a leg up. In contrast to non-replicable studies based upon inductive theory, I thereby render it far easier for historians and political scientists to challenge the objectivity and accuracy of my analysis a: Note also the founding complaint of the journal, European Union Politics: When the editors started to contribute to the field, integration studies often fell victim to debates between the paradigmatic approaches in International Relations.
In the s and early s, it was still possible to launch a career on a two-by-two table which described the 'nature' of the European Union. Fortunately, times are changing and the number of papers which offer general theories of European integration is seemingly decreasing Schneider, 6 The same issue of the journal contains a review article on institutionalist approaches to the EU Dowding, , in which the author makes an explicit claim that rational choice institutionalism has acquired the status of a 'normal science' of EU studies.
See in particular Dowding, and the reply by Marsh and Smith, By 'Americanisation', I mean a tendency to import the norms that have come to prevail within mainstream US political science, whilst seeking to discredit or invalidate approaches to the EU that do not subscribe to those norms. The first step is the emergence of a particular political science of the EU drawing upon positivistic and rationalistic premises and proceeding through certain epistemological standards.
The second step involves pushing this particular political science of the EU as the 'normal' political science of the EU. At one level, this becomes a political argument along the lines of the perestroika critique of mainstream US political science. One way of thinking through this issue is to use a 'sociology of knowledge' frame as a means to interrogate the position discussed in the previous paragraph.
A relatively innocuous starting point is the observation that the development of theory and method within a sub-field should not simply be contextualised by that field's object of study, but also by the broader disciplinary and social scientific environment within which that field is located. Foundational Myths In addition to the recent interventions on behalf of a particular notion of rigour, there is a commonplace account of 'integration theory' that uses precisely the kind of argument to suggest a precise and unproblematic relationship between theory and object of study.
The story of the rise and fall of neo-functionalist theories of regional integration has been told often enough and, in many ways, has acquired the status of a foundational myth in EU studies.
The failings of neofunctionalism are invariably taken to reside in its mis-depiction and mis-prediction of what was actually going on in the European Communities from the mids. In particular the rise to prominence of de Gaulle, together with the 'empty chair crisis' and recalibration of the Communities' institutional balance in an intergovernmental direction 11 See Wasver, or a discussion of the dynamics of'Americanisation' in IR.
Moreover, the lacklustre record of regional integration schemes elsewhere and their seeming incapacity to replicate the European model or to even survive provided a severe blow to the predictive and generalising ambitions of neofunctionalists. Key interventions acknowledging these dilemmas by Ernst Haas, the dominant integration theorist of the s and s, were taken as a sign of neofunctionalism effectively 'falling on its sword'. The narrow 'truth as correspondence view' is one of several purposes that theory may have.
It begets a certain sort of social science and a particular type of social scientific reasoning. It also invites us to evaluate theory in a particular way. One of the interesting things about the parable of neofunctionalism is that the early integration theorists themselves readily bought into this mode of evaluation a point that Haas makes for the umpteenth time in his recent essay - Haas, They did so because neofunctionalism itself aspired to certain sorts of context bound social scientific norms.
But - as Moravcsik notes 11 - the demise of integration theory as a discrete pursuit in the s was also bound up with a general emerging distaste for 'grand theory' in political science and a consequent embrace of the mid-range. Thus neofunctionalism was also unsustainable because of the broader shifts in contemporary conceptions of what made viable 'theory'. Indeed, in one of the most prescient - but least-read - intergovernmentalist critics of neofunctionalism, Roger Hansen pointed to matters of theory construction and epistemology as his explanation for the alleged theoretical blind-spots and the lack of explanatory power of Haas et al' s work.
How we tell stories about the genesis and development of a discipline and how we construe of its major debates are major features of both a pedagogy and b theoretical exegesis in any sub-field. Recent studies in IR have sought to explore how these 'foundational myths' are not simply benign misconstruals, but active shapers of present concerns and debates in the discipline.
Thus partial readings or mis-readings have the ongoing and cumulative effect of a defining what is legitimate IR and what 11 is not IR as well as b constructing present oppositions between theoretical schools in the context of previous great debates. Brian Schmidt's ; detailed re-reading of the foundations of disciplinary IR yields the central insight that the conventional stories filling textbooks about the origins and early development of IR are misconceived in all sorts of ways.
This isn't just about the reproduction of a set of errors although the mechanics of ongoing misconstrual is an interesting subject in its own right , but as Steve Smith notes 'the discipline gets defined as one founded solely on the problem of inter-state war. Thus, explaining this specific problem becomes the litmus test for the admissibility of approaches to the 'authentic' community of IR b: It also sets up a common sense chronology of IR as a series of great debates, which runs something like this: idealist origins - realist correctives - behaviouralist 'science' - neorealist formalisation - neoliberal institutionalist challenges - constructivist critiques of rationalism and the displacement of neorealism as the rival to neoliberal institutionalism, with various syntheses along the way.
Scholars of the origins of realism the tendency to present classical realism as a deeply rationalist and de-ethicised theory i. In particular, the headline claims are that a deeper reading of say Morgenthau will demonstrate a a sophisticated historical sociology and a proto-constructivist ontology and b a post-Augustinian ethical commitment Williams, ; Murray, The surgical removal of these elements which we see most clearly with the emergence of neorealism is a process that Waever sees as part and parcel of what he calls the 'de-Europeanisation' of American IR Waever.
This is all bound up with the 'Americanisation' of the discipline of IR, by which Waever seems to mean the development of state-centred theory of international politics commensurate with the emergent presentational and theory-building norms of US political science. Return to Book Page. We use cookies to give you the best possible experience. Malvika rated it really liked it Mar 12, Rosamond or a reliable guide through the jungle of theories in the field. This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website.
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But opting out of some of these cookies may have an effect on your browsing experience. Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information. M rated it it was amazing Dec 01, This thoroughly researched book engages with the key debates to have arisen from theoretical deliberations about European integration.
Ever Closer Union Desmond Dinan. Description In this nitegration book-length treatment of integration theory for many years, Ben Rosamond provides an accessible and stimulating critical introduction to the full range of classical and contemporary perspectives.
The European Council Wolfgang Wessels. Please enter the letters displayed. Provides a thorough, authoritative and concise exposition and assessment of the main theoretical perspectives on European Integration Wide export potential, especially in Continental Europe.
Trivia About Theories of Europ Rosamond offers a reliable guide through the jungle of theories in the field. The EU is nothing close to a state like Germany or France; but it is far far more than an intergovernmental organization like the International Postal Union.
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