European social science as a transnational field of research

Despite meticulous analyses of various aspects of the process of European integration, social scientists have hardly begun to examine their own modes of association. And yet, aside from the single market and the political union, European institution building has unmistakably extended into the domain of scholarship and science as well. After a critical look at the historical roots of this process, I will in this chapter focus on the question of how post-war European integration has affected the social sciences and humanities. First, I shall outline how the European research policy pertaining to these disciplines has developed. European funding came to be concentrated in ‘Framework programmes’ and, more recently, in the European Research Council (2007). The strong growth of these funds was accompanied by increasing collaboration across national borders and the formation of ‘European’ journals and associations in virtually every discipline and research domain. Representing a widening range of opportunities for transnational collaboration, these institutional arrangements are best conceived as an emerging transnational research field.¹ In exploring the structure and significance of this field, three dimensions will be considered: differences between countries, variations across disciplines, and the relationship between intra-and extra-European collaboration. In the final part of the chapter, I will briefly consider European social science not so much on the institutional, but rather on the individual level. Although the European social scientific field is in many respects still weak, citation data indicate that European scholars dominate rankings of the most cited book authors in the social sciences and humanities. It is argued that this paradoxical fact should receive more attention when considering the strengths and weaknesses of the social sciences in Europe.