ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the process and institutions, and some motivations and impediments to European integration, and also analyses how international relations theorists have interpreted this recast political theatre: its actors, rules, clashes, scope, objectives and directions. An enterprise intended to denationalize Europe politically, actually animated the opposite. One common perspective on European integration stresses how the founders of the European Coal and Steel Community and the European Economic Community hoped to dispel national rivalries and promote cooperative and eventually communal goals, benefits, and solutions. Integration progressed despite setbacks because regional cooperation and a primacy of nation-states remained compatible. The study of European politics has encouraged interdisciplinary approaches: international relations; comparative policy analysis; domestic structures and sectoral interests; policy networks; and new variants of functionalism. As an academic discipline, International Relations were dominated by American scholarship with a corresponding tendency to place the US or US-Soviet bipolarity at the centre of considerations.
