EU Scholarship Research Articles

Rethinking EU Scholarship

Following the dramatic No votes in the French and Dutch referendums on 29 May and 1 June 2005, a need was felt in the European constitutional law profession to react to the shock.EuConst invited members of its Board and members of the European Constitutional Law Network to write a short comment about possible and possibly salutary effects of the events on the ways of European scholarship and teaching. Below are the reactions received. Authors are all members of ECLN and/or the Board of EuConst.The contributions to this issue of EuConst by Jacques Ziller, Sacha Prechal and Herman van Gunsteren carry their comments on the events incorporated.

The European constitutional compromise and the neofunctionalist legacy

Neofunctionalism, a framework rather than a theory, has long played an important role in EU scholarship. Yet initial versions were overly comprehensive, incompletely specified and, as a result, non-falsifiable. Once concrete claims about the history of the EU are specified more precisely, they tend to be invalid: national preferences rarely result from unintended spillover, supranational entrepreneurs are rarely decisive – findings often disguised by poor theoretical specification and selection bias in EU scholarship. For the study of the EU today, the most important weakness of neofunctionalism is that its focus on ‘ever closer union’ obscures the emergence over the past decade of a stable constitutional equilibrium – a European Constitutional Compromise. This compromise is unlikely to be undermined by substantive, institutional, or ideological developments over the medium term – because current constitutional arrangements are substantively effective, institutionally protected, and democratically legitimate. The EU has reached constitutional maturity.

Institutionalist Research on the European Union

This article critically examines the recent wealth of institutionalist rational choice literature on the EU. It appraises the major fault lines and debates. It argues that non-cooperative game theory provides a thorough set of tools to examine the effects of different sorts of institutions upon the powers and limitations of different institutional actors. In certain areas scholars have not fully utilized the models applied to other political systems, but EU scholarship has taken a great leap forward in the past few years. Fully specified models with proper predictions are now being developed, though there is a tendency for modellers to introduce too many new assumptions that make empirical comparison with earlier models problematic, as it is sometimes hard to see which new assumptions are of most import. But we are into a new phase of normal science rational choice institutionalist explanation of the EU.