ABSTRACT
There are powerful obstacles on the way to a sociological history of European integration. First and foremost is the scope of the configuration (involving States, organizations and institutions) that defes not so much the theoretical, but more so the empirical ability for anyone to reconstruct the genesis of Europe beyond the usual generalizations or accumulation of details. This is particularly true if one intends to go beyond reifed entities (“the State”) to analyze the role of elites, networks and agents in the genesis of this configuration. Second, and not less important, is the scale of the process that runs through periods of history that seem worlds apart (if all defined by war), the Great War, the Interwar, World War II, and the Cold War. This is even more so when one wishes to understand how the course of events is not only the result of individual or even collective actions, but of longue durée processes of State formation and transformation in which warfare is precisely one central aspect. Third, and most paradoxically, is the impact that political, bureaucratic, juridical and academic discourses themselves have had on our implicit representations of these processes and configurations, which constitute what Gaston Bachelard termed “epistemological obstacles” (Bachelard 2001). A few intertwined assumptions are particularly implicit in most narratives of European integration. One first assumption is that some specific events are breakpoints in the process, the Declaration of 9 May 1950 being one of them, and officially celebrated as the birthday of European construction. This storyline should, however, be understood for what it is, a teleological construction leading us to conceive of everything that happened after as a consequence (and a logical one) of that particular event — not only the Treaty of Paris, but also the Treaties of Rome, the Single European Act, the Treaty of Maastricht, and so forth. A second assumption, which derives from the first one, is that the process is centrally located within the limits of one organization, the European Economic Community (later, the European Union) its development being generally analyzed in isolation from the wider European construction. This focalization should, however, again be understood for what it is: A retrospective dissection leading us to conceive of everything that happened outside as disconnected from that particular arena — not only the other European Communities, but also the Council of Europe, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the Western European Union and so forth. In other words, part of the object is to understand how the object was constructed and reconstructed by the actors themselves — including academics (Cohen 2007).
