Researching the EU (Studies) into demise?

ABSTRACT

The European Union (EU) may not have met the expectations of many EU scholars muddling through crises rather than propelling forward. Reports about its demise, however, appear greatly exaggerated. Rather than taking it as a forgone conclusion that the EU is doomed, this contribution outlines a research strategy to assess the state of European integration and the EU. Acknowledging the ‘pro-integration bias’ in EU studies, I argue that we need a more differentiated conceptualization of integration that takes disintegration rather than stagnation as the opposite value of integration. Even then, though, there is no real evidence that the EU is to collapse and terminate. This is not to say that there are no signs of disintegration. Nationalist, exclusionary discourses and practices of non-compliance reinforce each other in creating potential for disintegration. But even if they resulted in disintegration, this would not necessarily mean the end of the EU nor of EU studies. If theories can explain why European integration has moved forward, reversing their causal logic should be able to explain why it is not or relapses.

KEYWORDS:

• Crisis
• disintegration
• EU studies
• European integration theories

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Michael Blauberger and Berthold Rittberger for their very helpful comments on previous versions of this contribution.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Tanja A. Börzel is professor of political science and director of the Center for European Integration at the Otto Suhr Institute for Political Science, Freie Universität Berlin.

Notes

1 Speech by President Jean-Claude Juncker at the Annual General Meeting of the Hellenic Federation of Enterprises (SEV), Athens, 21 June 2016, http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_SPEECH-16-2293_de.htm (accessed 31 October 2017).

2 I am grateful to Berthold Rittberger for pointing this out to me.

3 http://www.jepp-online.com/2016/12/14/the-eu-in-crisis-eu-studies-in-crisis/ (accessed 31 October 2017).

4 Junker speech, see note 1.

5 See, for instance, http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/International_trade_in_goods; http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Foreign_direct_investment_statistics (accessed 18 November 2017).

6 Ibid.

7 https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy-environment/news/eu-court-bans-logging-in-polands-primeval-forest/ (accessed 22 October 2017).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Freie Universität Berlin.