ABSTRACT
Ever since Jacques Delors prophesized in 1988 that within one decade 80 percent of national legislation would be of EC/EU origin, the figure has crystallized a passionate debate over issues as different as the loss of national sovereignty, the regulatory burden for business, the risks for national culture, identity, etc.1 While political, bureaucratic, and academic actors take a great variety of standpoints in these controversies, from welcoming this alleged trend to elaborating strategies to stop this seemingly inexorable increase, all eventually draw from the same toolbox. When it comes to calculating the actual (legal) ‘state of the Union,’ these actors inescapably rely on the notion of acquis communautaire (a concept so naturalized that it has become impossible to translate: Peyro 1999) and its related online database, Eur-lex (the official and legally binding source of EU law).2 Nowadays, this cognitive and technical equipment is not just the instrument that officially defines and authenticates that ‘Europe’ to which the candidates are applying in phases of enlargement;3 it equally inserts itself into the most routine operations of the EU, turning into Europe’s ‘constitutional operating system […], axiomatic, beyond discussion, above the debate, like the rules of democratic discourse, or even the very rules of rationality themselves, which seemed to condition debate but not to be part of it’ (Weiler 1997). Although all textbooks, multiple-choice questionnaires, and European
glossaries routinely refer to this toolbox as ‘the total sum of obligations that have accumulated since the founding of the European Coal and Steel Community,’ it would be misleading to refer to it as a transparent technical device merely ‘calculating’ a pre-existing body of ‘rights and duties’ that lie ‘out there’ in wait to be weighed up. In fact, there is much more to the acquis and its related Eur-lex database than just an amount of texts. As a variety of strands in the sociology of scientific knowledge have repeatedly established (Breslau 1997; Callon 1986; Latour 2005), techniques and methods involve a number of operations and procedures that determine at one and the same time units of data aggregation (here: the EU institutions), a logic in ordering them (a supranational constitutional order), and relatedly relevant levels of public policy to act thereupon (the European level). As it formalizes a stable figure of Europe (its foundations, its missions) and of its value objects (its body of law), the acquis implicitly locates the ability and the responsibility for the ‘rational guidance’ of European affairs, in particular institutions (here: the Commission and the Court) and professional groups (Euro-lawyers and EU civil servants), while dispossessing others (here: Member States, constitutional courts, national diplomats, bureaucrats, etc.).4 As such, the instrument therefore encapsulates a form of ‘methodological Europeanism’ that frames our perception of Europe’s polity, defining it as a law-abiding (a ‘Union of law’), and supranational entity. Famously, the concept of ‘methodological nationalism’ has been used extensively by German sociologist Ulrich Beck (Beck 2005). Yet, while the notion proved integral in his critique of Nation-States’ iron cage and in his search for transnational ways to overcome these intellectual blinkers, Beck never actually turned the notion into an overall sociological research
194 Antoine Vauchez
program (Chernilo 2006). Likewise, the notion of ‘methodological Europeanism,’ a notion he actually only mentions en passant, is essentially thought of as bearing the same noxious effects as its national counterpart (‘methodological nationalism’). However, this article stands on the premise that the notion of ‘methodological Europeanism’ can actually prove to be a heuristic historical analyzer for how specific knowledge instruments and analytical concepts have been historically ‘caged’ EU polity, in a way that is analogous to how notions of class, family, society, law, etc. have historically been ‘caged’ in the framework of Nation-States, thereby molding our understanding of the space of political possibles in modernity (Mann 1993). Through the genealogy of one of the Europe’s most diffuse building blocks, this article suggests opening a broader research program on the historical and contested process of ‘assemblage’ (Latour 2005) of a variety of theories, methods, and instruments into a form of ‘methodological Europeanism’ on which Europe’s supranational pole of government rests an essential part of its authority.5
