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In a world dominated by Westphalia states, the European Union (EU) is unique. Never before have independent countries collectively ceded so much authority to a supranational polity. The European experiment begun nearly sixty years ago has resulted in unprecedented economic and political integration. Precisely for this reason, the EU has captivated scholars’ attention from its inception. Although interest has fluctuated in conjunction with real-world developments, political scientists remain fixated on this sui generis organization.

Yet empirical uniqueness need not preclude theoretical generalization. In this article, we examine the political science of the EU along two dimensions. First, to what extent do scholars conceptualize the EU as sui generis versus a test case for broader theoretical development? Second, to what extent do scholars endeavor either to export EU-derived theories outward toward other fields, geographic regions, and political phenomena or to import outside explanatory theories and tools into the political science of the EU?

We proceed as follows. First, we briefly review the various stages of European integration and describe the EU as it exists today. Next, we evaluate past waves of EU scholarship, paying particular attention to the degree to which scholars emphasized specific or general explanations of the EU experience. We conclude with an assessment of the current state of the field. Recent work is ample, diverse, and represented in multiple venues that spotlight all types of EU-related political science. We propose that the most promising programs for future research are those that engage the EU both in its empirical specificity and in its opportunities for theoretical generality.

The Sui Generis EU

Following the devastation of World War II (1939–1945), western European elites committed themselves to peace through economic cooperation. In 1951, six countries—Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands— formed the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) through the Treaty of Paris, carrying out designs for a united Europe envisioned by Jean Monnet and proposed by French foreign minister Robert Schuman. The 1957 Treaty of Rome extended this cooperation to a broader functional sphere by calling for the establishment of a common market (the European Economic Community) within which goods, services, labor, and capital could circulate freely. The European Community, which emerged in the 1960s, covered a wide range of economic and related policies through an institutional framework comprising most importantly an executive and supranational European Commission, a legislative and intergovernmental Council of Ministers, a consultative supranational European Parliament (EP), and a supranational European Court of Justice.

Spurred by the European Community’s early success, Denmark, Ireland, and the United Kingdom joined in 1973, followed by Greece in 1981 and Spain and Portugal in 1986. A new treaty, the Single European Act, entered into force in 1987. It called for completion of the single European market and undertook significant institutional reforms, including a return to majority voting in the Council of Ministers and an enhancement of the powers of the EP, the members of which had been directly and democratically elected since 1979. The 1993 Treaty on European Union (the Maastricht Treaty) expanded the sociopolitical ambitions of the new EU and outlined a future economic and monetary union, resulting in the 1999 adoption and 2002 circulation of a new single currency, the euro. Additional reforms further empowered the EP, renamed the Council of Ministers with the title Council of the European Union, institutionalized the European Council (gathering heads of state and government of EU member states), and laid the groundwork for expanded membership to include Austria, Finland, and Sweden in 1995, ten Mediterranean and central/eastern European countries in 2004 (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia, Cyprus, and Malta) and Bulgaria and Romania in 2007. The present EU encompasses nearly five hundred million citizens within twenty-seven member states and manages an economy of nearly $15 trillion (GDP; 2008 estimate). Its functional scope now ranges across most of the policy terrain once monopolized by the Westphalian state.

The EU is unquestionably the most successful regional integration effort in the world. Nowhere else has a group of national governments repeatedly concentrated such extensive decision-making power in the hands of a largely supranational entity. Throughout its history, European integration has provided ample fodder for political scientists, who have approached its study in a variety of ways.

Political Science Of The EU

Our review of the history of political science research on the EU is largely conventional, closely following accounts offered by James Caporaso and John Keeler (1995) and John Keeler (2005). Our main departure is to focus on the disciplinary contours of this evolution and to emphasize the inter play between the specific and the general in the political science of the EU.

First Wave: Generalizable Intentions, Late 1950s Through Early 1970s

Conventional accounts date the first wave of political science research on the present-day EU from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. Three broad-scale grand theories of European integration emerged, all of which aspired to generalization either from the outside in (assimilating Europe to patterns identified from geographically and historically different cases) or from the inside out (deriving general lessons from the postwar European experience).

The first major approach began with a collective, interdisciplinary project led by political scientist Karl Deutsch of Princeton University. Focused on the question of international community formation, Deutsch and colleagues in Political Community and the North Atlantic Area (1957) examined ten historical cases to generate propositions about the prospects for a North Atlantic community, including western Europe. Deutsch’s “transnationalism” argued that integration was a function of social interconnectedness, as produced by such things as flows of goods, mail, and people and as measured by these and by survey data tapping mutual sympathies among individuals. The greater the extent to which members of the units were assimilated into a common social space, the greater were the prospects for community formation and political integration. While political scientists undertook considerable and quite sophisticated research along these lines during the next decade and a half, transactionalist research petered out by the early 1970s, with an overall decline in political scientific interest in integration and the EU.

The second and most prominent first-wave integration theory—one that has never disappeared from political science research on the EU—emerged with the publication of Ernst Haas’s The Uniting of Europe (1958). Analyzing the ECSC in the 1950s, Haas derived four general conditions for political integration: (1) well-developed central institutions that could argue for and respond to integrative demands, (2) elite activation around those central institutions, (3) embrace of “inherently expansive tasks” so as to promote “spillover” from initial to later steps, and (4) “continuity of national policy aims” (Lindberg 1963, 7–12). Haas’s “neofunctional” approach to regional integration married the practice of Europe’s “founding fathers,” Jean Monnet and Robert Schumann, with the methods of modern political science.

Neofunctionalism became a vibrant political science research program in the 1960s. First, it gave rise to a spate of research on regional integration beyond Europe. While ambitious in their intent to generalize from the European experience, these efforts proved unsuccessful, especially insofar as less-developed countries were concerned. Second, and at the same time, neofunctionalism grappled with challenges presented by developments within Europe itself. French president Charles de Gaulle’s 1965–1966 refusal to countenance further integrative steps laid out in the Treaty of Rome posed a special challenge to the theory, which had been predicated on continuous progression toward deeper integration. The resulting proliferation of concepts, variables, and measures suggested that neofunctionalism was an increasingly degenerating research program.

The last approach in this wave (and the major alternative to neofunctionalism), intergovernmentalism, insisted on the primacy of nation-states and national experiences in delimiting European integration. Most forcefully articulated by Stanley Hoffmann (1966), it argued that integration would proceed only as far as national governments conspired to work together, as national interests would always retain precedence and thereby hinder the emergence of a truly supranational organization. This would be especially true in areas of “high politics,” including political and security issues, where the absolute sovereignty of nation-states would remain intact. Intergovernmentalism drew its inspiration from realist theories of international relations (IR), imbuing national governments with concrete security preferences that, in conjunction with uncertainty over other states’ future intentions, would constrain their willingness to put European interests above national ones. Supranational and transnational efforts to transcend these hard constraints would only antagonize states and further retrench state sovereignty in core areas.

All three first-wave approaches aspired to general theoretical accounts of European integration. Deutsch and colleagues worked from the outside in, assimilating the postwar North Atlantic experience to patterns of community formation identified from other times and places. By contrast, Haas approached generalization from the inside out, analyzing the ECSC to “advance generalizations about the processes by which political communities are formed among sovereign states” (Haas 1958, xi). Hoffmann held the middle ground. While he sought to draw inferences from the European experience to “contemporary world politics” and “unification movements elsewhere” (Hoffmann 1966, 867), his major contribution was arguably to bring general IR theory (in his case, realism) into the study of the EU. In all three cases, theoretical elaborations and limitations, while aspiring to generality, mirrored facts on the ground, with the relatively optimistic neofunctional and transactionalist approaches holding sway when the EU was working well as a supranational organization and intergovernmentalism ascending when it was not.

Second Wave: Sui Generis Approaches, Early 1970s Through Late 1980s

The second wave of political science research into the EU began with events in the real world, including the end of supranational integration post–de Gaulle and the end of the postwar economic miracle in the major European economies. Caporaso and Keeler (1995) refer to this as the “doldrums” period for the EU and political science research into it. Haas (1975) announced the obsolescence of his own neofunctionalism. And Donald Puchala (1972) claimed that regional integration theorists had been like blind men inspecting an elephant, each finding a different part and none agreeing on the others’ characterizations. The zeitgeist involved a substantial abandonment of grand theory and a retreat into narrower, less ambitious work that eschewed generalization beyond the European case. Work of this time was predominantly descriptive rather than explanatory or theoretical. John Keeler (2005) brings several indicators to bear along these lines, the most relevant of which is the retrenchment of work on the EU into specialized journals such as the Journal of Common Market Studies and the Journal of European Integration. In one view, “integration theory [was] run into the ground, probably because . . . this new and complex phenomenon could not be studied by our conventional tools of analysis” (Loukas Tsoukalis, quoted in Rosamond 2006, 12).

Third Wave: Generalizability Returns, Late 1980s Through 1990s

The European integration process was relaunched in the mid-1980s, most notably with the 1985 adoption of a single market program calling for the abolition of all internal barriers to economic exchange by the end of 1992. This “1992 program,” embodied in the 1987 Single European Act, not only reinvigorated the EU but also catalyzed a rediscovery of integration theory among political scientists. Two main contenders, both rooted in general IR political science scholarship, emerged relatively quickly. The first, signaled by Wayne Sandholtz and John Zysman’s (1989) analysis of the single-market program, characterized the revival of the European Community as a series of elite bargains (involving especially the European Commission, industr ial elites, and national politicians) responding to changes in the international economic structure (relative U.S. decline and the rise of Japanese economic power). Subsequent work emphasized similar features in explaining smaller-scale parts of EU integration and continued to insist on a foundation in IR, rather than integration, theory.

The reemergence of accounts that were at least consistent with, if not explicitly derived from, neofunctionalism generated a new intergovernmentalist response that emphasized the primacy of state interests in driving and delimiting the European integration process.Andrew Moravcsik (1991) downplayed the entrepreneurial success of the European Commission, denied any inherent institutional logic toward deeper integration, and minimized the role of transnational elites. Viewing European integration as “conventional statecraft,” he emphasized that states’ preferences and power defined both the demand for and the supply of supranational integration. This IR-inspired liberal intergovernmental approach eventually provided a powerful synthesis combining a theory of institutional choice with rigorous accounts of state preference formation and interstate bargaining.

In contrast to liberal intergovernmentalism, the rediscovery of supranational institutions and transnational societal (business) actors found expression in a further body of third wave literature dealing not with the broad architecture of European integration (i.e., it was not a grand theory) but with the activities of the European Court of Justice and the ongoing process of legal integration. A related vein of research on the constitutionalization of the EU’s founding treaties—whereby it was transformed from traditional international law into a hierarchically integrated legal system granting rights directly to citizens—merged neofunctionalist insights about elites with Karl Deutsch’s concern for international transactions to provide a powerful political theory of EU legal integration. This discovery of the law by political scientists working on the EU remains a key feature of the literature.

Two last third-wave developments bear mentioning here. First, there were at least two additional attempts at developing grand political science theories of European integration to rival the revived neofunctionalist and intergovernmentalist work. Gary Marks (1993) proposed a theory of “multilevel governance” that sought to account for the general upward and downward diffusion of political authority in the EU and beyond. Alec Stone Sweet’s (1998) work on legal integration guided new scholarship on EU development along transactionalist-neofunctionalist lines. Second, the 1990s amplified and extended the third wave’s emphasis on the importation of theories, models, and methods from across political science. Simon Hix’s (1994) call for more comparative politics work on the EU inspired countless studies. The 1990s also saw increasing attention to the American politics literature, with the adoption of ideas including spatial models, principal-agent models of delegation, and numerous others.

Fourth Wave: The Normal Political Science Of The EU, Present Day

The current phase of political science research into the EU represents a continuation of trends begun in the third wave. The grand theories of European integration have not gone away. References to neofunctionalism (also known as supranationalism) and intergovernmentalism remain de rigueur in the literature. Yet the bulk of research is occupied with lower order problems tackled through middle-range theories, most often drawing on (or at least consonant with) broader political science literatures. Debates seem increasingly pragmatic rather than paradigmatic.

Thus, the normalization of the EU in political science is perhaps the most striking feature of the present-day literature. Recent work from both sides of the Atlantic draws on and informs non-EU work across the subfields and methodological traditions of the discipline. Four journals mainly devoted to the EU—Journal of Common Market Studies, Journal of European Integration, Journal of European Public Policy, and European Union Politics—speak equally to EU specialists and to political science generalists working in a wide range of subfields. The amount of EU-related work appearing in general journals is also on the rise. The degree of transatlantic and interdisciplinary cross-fertilization stands at unparalleled levels. Thus, we reject any long-standing questions about subfield (especially comparative and IR) incompatibilities, about an alleged transatlantic scholarly cleavage, and about the appropriateness of applying general political science to the sui generis EU.

Conclusion

The analysis above documents the main approaches to the study of the EU along two complementary dimensions: the scope of their theoretical aims (general or particular) and the direction of theoretical application (inside-out or outside in). While not necessarily exclusive to any one period, the categories produced by this division allow us to capture the many ways in which EU scholarship has evolved and progressed over the years. The first period attempted to develop generalizable theories of integration, both from the inside out and from the outside in. Scholarship eventually moved to a second, more sui generis period concerned with EU specific affairs when real-world integration decelerated. The third period witnessed the resurgence of prior integration theories, the development of entirely new exportable theoretical explanations, and the application of imported explanatory frameworks to EU data. Over the long haul, and in the present fourth wave, all of these trends have come to coexist. While the EU is still undeniably unique, political scientists now view it as a means for acquiring both general and specific knowledge.

Having summarized the main trends in EU-related political science, we here conclude with some final thoughts on its future. We expect the EU, as the most advanced regional integration project worldwide, to remain an important fixture of political science research for three reasons. First, the EU continues to evolve, providing a living laboratory within which to study rigorously a great many political phenomena. Second, this evolution inspires political scientists insofar as it reveals both an EU specificity and suspected similarities to politicaleconomic, institutional, and behavioral processes operative elsewhere. Third, new regional integration efforts under way around the world may look to emulate the EU’s model of supranational governance and economic union, giving rise to an already-bourgeoning field of comparative regionalism. Precisely because it is so distinctive and seductive, the EU provides scholars with endless options for engaging in both inside-out and outside-in theoretical work, either of which satisfies the aspirations of general political science.

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