ABSTRACT
The Amsterdam School (AS) can be explored as a social construct, a theoretical approach, and a political project. It had already formed before it was first construed as one of seven major schools in the regulation approach in the author's contribution to the First International Conference on Regulation Theory, held in June 1988 in Barcelona. In 1974, a small group of students and teachers in International Relations (IR) at the University of Amsterdam embarked on a teaching research project on 'Social Forces in Western European Integration' in the 1940s–1950s, its economic and political antecedents from the 1920s onwards, and its subsequent development into the 1970s. Overbeek's authoritative survey recalls that the AS emerged from collaborative research at the University of Amsterdam on European integration in opposition to the prevailing mainstream approaches of federalism and neofunctionalism. A key aspect of the dialectic of structure and agency concerns the conditions in which social forces can make a difference.
