ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the significance of the findings or of the internal logic of research and its assumptions, first, the assumed progression in terms of the explanatory power and proceeds to an analysis of the essential assumptions and their backgrounds in the study of integration. It explores the crucial choices made in research and offers elements for understanding why certain choices have been made. After having shown the assumptions behind the different views on the relationship between the state and integration, the chapter deals with an analysis of the crucial and complicated questions to which these assumptions are answers, identifying the alternative assumptions among which the scholar in principle can choose. The aim of explaining phenomena causally, for instance, of identifying causes and dynamisms of integration, requires an evaluation of the relative importance of different possible causes.
