ABSTRACT
European integration may not appear an exciting topic for a sociologist to address. For many people, this integration is just one more step towards an open world market and makes intra-European wars or protectionist barriers obsolete; for others, it means the loss of political and cultural independence of European nations and the subordination of political and social institutions to arbitrary decisions made by markets or bureaucrats. But both arguments, positive and negative, are so general and so unable to demonstrate the errors of the opposite stance that we don’t trust them. We consider them, on the contrary, as ideologies that rationalize precise but limited interests or as historical intuitions that can have extremely important effects but, instead of offering explanations of actual behaviour, need themselves to be explained. The reason for our uneasiness when we speak about Europe is that it is an indirect way of speaking about something else or, more precisely, about the opposite of European integration, namely our national states. The political process in which we are participating is much less the construction of a European state than the partial de-nationalization of European countries or their entrance into a postnational era. If this idea is accepted, a reflection on European integration becomes an interrogation of the positive or negative effects of this integration on the countries that are undergoing this process of de-nationalization for reasons that have less to do with European institutional integration than with the formation of superpowers during the Cold War and with the diffusion of an internationalized but American-centred mass culture.
