ABSTRACT
Introduction In what follows I rehearse and interrogate elements of a global and European Studies scholarship to be found in the imbrication of sociological institutionalism, modern systems theory (MST) and network analysis, where the latter includes complexity models of social (dis)order. Some of the approaches on offer are full-blown macro accounts of how social worlds are constructed; sometimes they traffic a kind of macro-lite. By proffering a macrolite approach, I hope to demonstrate the advantages of analysing Europe-making through the lens of theories and concepts that invest in structural and systemic models of social constitution and global constitution. But I intend to gloss these approaches in ways that round out, even soften, these robust features of macro approaches because they are too determinate in their treatment of social constitution and too resolute in how they define both structural properties and systemness to capture the fluid and still indeterminate qualities of Europe-making. In this regard, I will have recourse to some forms of complexity science, which point up
the institutional lightness or mutability of network formation and allow us to treat the processes of Europe-making without undue hindrance from the usual suspects of
integration theory: indeed, of social theory in general-state-society, local-global and agent-structure binaries, as well as rigid levels of analysis. In some respects, the approaches I adopt are bedfellows, but they are not natural partners. I acknowledge areas of tension between the approaches and note particularly their bloodless treatment of agency and, more variably, consciousness while still holding out the possibility of synergy. It is also true to say that the component approaches of my macro-lite ensemble hardly
figure in the mainstream of integration theory and have not unduly troubled the critical imagination of students of European Studies. Nonetheless, I think that fruitful synergies reside in the imbrication of these approaches. While the EU institutional complex can be described in quite different ways-as supranational, as a form of multi-level governance, as a network state or as genetically unique-it is a very sophisticated form of non-state governance, a proto-polity at the least and the most developed attempt to achieve a transnational community of affect using methods for integrating societal entities that lack a common culture but display ever more functional interconnections. My approach is facilitated by, indeed requires, address to the global and to global
scholarship, because like theories of European unity the raison d’eˆtre of global theory is the question of how, or whether, society and polity can be structured beyond the national scale. I argue that it is the manner in which the global is referenced and the inferences about Europe-making that can be made from global referents and global scholarship that have most significance for European Studies. At the same time, not all such scholarship is retrievable for my purposes. For example, the global is articulated in some work on European integration, but mainly to underline the ‘out there’ quality of global constraints, rather than to depict Europe-making as inflected by and thus enacted through global processes and emergent globalities (Ross 1998; Wallace 1996). Elements of the theoretical calculus have been applied previously (see Geyer 2003). For
example, strains of neo-institutionalism are widely canvassed and the brand of sociological institutionalism practised by the Stanford School find their way into phenomenological and constructivist interpretations of EU polity-making. However, systems-theoretic work struggles to find favour in Anglo-American research, although it carries more weight in European, and especially German, political sociology. In addition, there was recourse to systems thinking in quite early work on European integration (Lindberg and Scheingold 1970). I see this article and the theoretical synthesis it proposes as a contribution to debate on how to shift Europe/EU studies out of the intellectual trammels still apparent in variants of comparative political science and international relations scholarship, in which task ways of comprehending emergent globalities, including the idea of world society, offer important insights. I will start with a brief account of the nature of and gaps in European Studies scholarship before identifying those elements of global scholarship that provide most purchase on the vagaries of Europe(s)-making.
