Another Europe is Possible: Critical Perspectives on European Union Politics

Abstract

Over the past two decades critical perspectives on the study of the European Union have blossomed in ways unimaginable from within the intellectual straitjacket of traditional political science during the Cold War era. The multitude of vistas provided by scholars working on European Union politics across the social sciences means that I can only provide a limited view of this vast wealth of critical perspectives. What becomes clear in writing this chapter is that EU politics, as found at EU Studies Associations across Europe and beyond, represents only a small portion of a now much broader and diverse field of social science. Despite over five decades of European integration to analyse and a huge array of attempts to explain these processes, the EU is now more diverse and less well understood than ever. This is not to say that those who study EU politics are searching for one explanation or model, simply that traditional approaches based on assumptions and techniques developed to analyse political systems during the Cold War look increasingly out of touch with contemporary EU politics. As EU referenda constantly remind us, many EU citizens (and non-citizens) are critical of the EU as a neoliberal political project, similar to the way in which traditional political science fails to challenge or change existing structures of power and injustice. As the two previous chapters have demonstrated, traditional approaches are forced to make many ceteris paribus assumptions in their analysis of the EU as an arena for political and social choice. In contrast, critical perspectives question the starting assumptions of political science by constantly raising these three questions – what is being studied? (ontological questions); what can we know? (epistemological questions); and how are we going to know? (methodological questions) (Hay 2002: 61–3). For critical scholarship, the answers to these questions are always political rather than neutral, as Jupille (2006) illustrates when he uncritically seeks to naturalize rational choice theory as a metatheory. Critical scholars understand that if politics is power, then political science involves the study of the processes and consequences of the 4