EUROPEAN INTEGRATION

European Integration

European Integration

Introduction

A reassessment of the European Union (EU) studies in recent years has seen an increasing interplay among disciplines, resulting in increased breadth and depth of conceptual development. The need for sustained dialogue between EU studies and international relations (IR) has been persuasively argued by scholars, such as, Andrew Moravcsik (1998), while the need to break down the barriers between disciplines and subdisciplines and particularly what Peterson regards as phoney wars between IR and comparative politics (CP) has, for some time, been a theme in the examination of the state of the study of the EU. In addition, the study of the EU has often been confined to the study of European integration (EI). European Studies is now becoming more broad and therefore, should include more than EI studies. In particular, it should be more interdisciplinary (Moravcsik, 1998, pp: 233).

This research examines the ways in which the concept of integration has been utilized and politically misused by scholars and the EU alike. As long as the term 'integration' is utilized to mean a political objective, a theoretical model, a policy process, a set of theories and a paradigm for regional bodies, then overuse of the term will take place. European integration has become increasingly contested as both a concept and a process and it is incumbent upon scholars to subject the EU to analytical treatment that does justice to its contemporary complexity of governance and its evolving nature (Moravcsik, 1998, pp: 241).

Discussion

The study of the EU can be introspective, with respect to the EU's internal process and conflicts, for example. Examinations of the EU in an international context often tend to deal with its relations with individual countries and, occasionally, regions, such as the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) or Mercosur, the Common Market of South America. From outside the EU, some analyses portray the EU as a rather successful economic entity but do not necessarily understand the transformative nature of the EU in political or normative terms. For example, Jachtenfuchs (2001: 256) has argued that 'the most exciting and most important aspect of European integration — namely the transformation of traditional nation-states into constituent units of a new transnational political system that is not going to become a state — is largely overlooked from the outside' (Sandoltz, 1998, pp: 22).

The EU's project of cooperation has always contained the means to radically alter international and national politics. While the EU's current agenda is very different from its origins, its current problems and crises are in part due to the distinctiveness of those very origins. This chapter surveys the existing literature on the topic of integration in an interdisciplinary manner and attempts to offer a critical and informed reading of the current debates on integration, the integration project and approaches to examining the EU (Sandoltz, 1998, pp: 34).

Integration has been expressed as the ultimate objective of the EU and its precursor, the European Community. This has sometimes meant that the end goal of integration is referred to ...