EU Studies in Political Science. Rival Interpretations and the Art of Trespassing Borders

EU Studies in Political Science. Rival Interpretations and the Art of Trespassing Borders Andrea Mignone (University of Genoa) The studies of European Union have coincided with an intensification of particular approaches to making sense of the EU political institutions. EU studies are largely based on political science methods and approaches and it has been affected by the tendency within political science to be defined by particular “disciplinary” approaches (notably rational choice). Indeed, the development of EU studies could be seen as focusing on the EU as a “system”, and there has been a proliferation of approaches which seek to make a sense of European integration. While this remains only one part of the picture of EU studies, its growing significance must not be leading to a marginalisation of the inter-disciplinarity or multi-disciplinarity. Studying the European Union political system, asks us to think anew about political science as a discipline and how its sub-fields are separated or fit together. Theories on international relations have long benefited from the dynamic of European integration. The effort to theorize about the process of European integration began within the political science sub-field of international relations, and the field of integration theory in particular. During the first few decades of the integration process, the literature was essentially divided between (neo)-functionalists (political integration as a spillover effect of economic integration) and intergovernmentalists (national governments as gatekeepers). In recent years, however, there are other approaches to study the European Union, in particular in the fields of international relations (realists, rational choice and historical institutionalists, reflectivists or constructivists) and comparative politics (pluralism, neo-corporatism, transnationalism, multilevel governance studies, Lipset-Rokkan model). In no other substantive area is the relation between comparative politics and international relations so close and their existence as two independent sub-fields so problematic. But they have not distinct conceptual bases or theoretical contributions, so we can hope on the possibility to overcome the divide. The boundaries among the sub-fields of political science are not written in stone. European integration, alongside a variety of global economic and social pressures, has blurred the distinction between domestic and international politics. Among these recent studies, a more specific and original movement has developed around what we will refer as the political sociology of the EU. Currently, students of EU politics and policy-making are taking up insights from the new institutionalism in political science, sociology, economics. They debate over the relative applicability of International Relations and Comparative Politics for understanding the EU. The evolution of the studies on EU politics is a far from banal exercise. There are clearly many conceptions of what constitutes “scientific progress” in EU studies. In this essay we do not dispute that approaches from Comparative Politics (CP) can bring added value to the study of the EU. Nor is its intention to suggest that comparisons between the EU and nation states perform no useful function – quite the contrary. The EU contains elements that are irreducibly international, which makes the character of interactions within it fundamentally different from those within national political systems, even federal ones. Largely, though not exclusively, because of the unique nature of states as political actors, politics between them differs in numerous fundamental ways from the politics found within them. Comparative Politics approaches are often based on insights about the nature of politics that are not easily transposable from the domestic to the international realm. In: Morini M. (ed.), EU-Russia, Genova, Eidon Edizioni, 2010, pp. 49-83 (ISBN 978-88-95677-30-9)