ABSTRACT
European Union (EU) studies is going through a period of self-examination and change. From a political science perspective,1 the boundaries between the ‘European’, the ‘national’ and indeed the ‘global’ are increasingly blurred, meaning that the separation of the study of politics into separate boxes labelled with such titles as ‘comparative politics’, ‘public administration’, or ‘International Relations’ is decreasingly viable. For political science scholars of the EU, this is generating new opportunities as well as fresh challenges: equipped for many years now to examine the politics of transnational and supranational spaces and processes, we are in a position to contribute positively to the debates around global governance in International Relations (IR) scholarship – a reversal of the traditional hierarchy.2 And yet, political science studies of the EU are also lacking in certain respects. As political science scholars of the EU we have often shut ourselves away from colleagues in other areas of politics, and our engagement with salient material from other disciplines inside the domain of EU studies is not always as deep or as insightful as it might be.3 Furthermore, there is an ongoing debate in the field regarding the best way of going beyond the orthodox focus: a ‘normal science’ movement seeks to replicate in EU political studies the norms of positivist United States (US) political science, whereas an interdisciplinary movement seeks to reach out to a range of disciplines and sub-disciplines in order to generate a holistic perspective.4
