ABSTRACT
If one reads the major treaties that have served as the constitutional instruments guiding European integration a very challenging picture emerges. 1 The Schuman Plan, the Treaty of Rome, the Single European Act, and the Maastricht Treaty each address the issue of an ‘ever closer union’ in highly pragmatic, though often circumspect, terms. Indeed, the scholarship by political scientists, international relations theorists, and political economists that addresses the structural and developmental character of European integration provides a convincing framing of this process. The ‘uniting of Europe’ has been defined by the classic work of David Mitrany, Ernst Haas, Leon Lindberg, Joseph Nye, Paul Taylor, Robert Keohane and Stanley Hoffman, who elegantly theorize the internal dynamics, the ‘invisible’ hand, of integration, and the intricate ‘prerequisites’ and ‘spillovers’ that punctuate each stage of the process. They have also shaped the debate on the specific outcomes of the transference of governmental competencies and powers from member states to the institutions of the European Union (EU) in terms of ‘inter-governmental’ versus ‘supranational’ processes. 2 What these approaches have in common is their emphasis on evolving economic interests that have emerged in the last half of the twentieth century as the driving force for integration (Moravcsik 1998: 18-85). What they tend to overlook is the abiding social character of the European project, its deep preoccupation with society. It is this dimension of the project that lends itself to wide-ranging ethnographic analysis. Put simply, an ethnographic perspective on advanced European integration can and must link the study of the EU to a wider consideration of European society.
