Theorizing European Integration

I have just published a new article entitled: Theorizing European Integration: The Four Phases since Ernst Haas’ Original Contribution. It was written for a workshop organized by the Ernst Haas Chair at the European University Institute, Daniele Caramani, and published as part of a symposium issue of the Journal of European Public Policy on updating and commenting on Ernst Haas’ contributions to scholarship on European integration. Free downloads for the first 50 takers!

The article reflects on theories about the nature of European governance since the earliest theories pitting Ernst Haas’ neo-functionalist supranational spillover against Stanley Hoffman’s realist intergovernmentalism. I argue that while the substantive divides between intergovernmentalism and supranationalism replayed themselves over time, the methodological divides were equally important between those successively focused on intergovernmental interests versus supranational institutions, then intergovernmental versus supranational actors’ ideas and discourse as opposed to interests or institutions, and next on the impact of “post-functionalist” politics as interest-based or institutionally-driven versus ideationally/discursively defined. I conclude that it is perhaps the moment to recognize not only that a pluralism of actors/institutions now drives European integration but that this can also best be explained using a pluralism of approaches.