Although Pierre Bourdieu himself never paid much attention to European integration, except for his late denunciation of the neoliberal offensive (Bourdieu 1998, 2001), the field theory he refined all along his life is probably the most powerful resource we have for understanding the genesis and structure of what can be termed the European field of power. In one of his masterpieces, The State Nobility (1996), Bourdieu characterized the field of power as the locus of the struggle for power between different types of power holders. The emergence of a field of power is part of the process of the differentiation of society that leads to the formation of relatively autonomous social fields (economic, legal, bureaucratic, political, academic, artistic, and so forth), the present structure of the field of power of each society being therefore deeply path dependent and embedded in the past structuration of that society's social fields. Contrary to the economic or bureaucratic or academic field, in which agents struggle to accumulate a certain type of specific capital in order to access and occupy dominant positions, the field of power is a field of struggle between agents already holding dominant positions in their respective social field in order to set the value of their initial capital and eventually convert part of this capital, thereby diversifying their portfolio of capitals in occupying dominant positions in other social fields. As Pierre Bourdieu put it in a far-reaching reformulation of both Emile Durkheim (1997[1893]) and Max Weber (1978[1956]), this struggle over the “dominant principle of domination,” which determines the division of labor of domination in a society, is also a struggle over the “legitimate principle of legitimation,” which ultimately determines the reproduction of the elites (Bourdieu 1989:376)—particularly through the elites schools system, the main topic of the book. Each …