Ben Rosamond
Biographic Data
| ID | 380389 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ben Rosamond |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ben |
| FAMILY NAME | Rosamond |
| SIGNATURE | BEN ROSAMOND |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Copenhagen |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1487-7703 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 35 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 761 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 35 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1990 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
Wicked politics and trashy economics: Gender and scandalous expertise
Who gets to speak with authority about the economy? Countering problematic identity-blindness, we develop a framework for exploring how identity designates whose economic expertise is perceived as authentic and authoritative according to the intersectional exclusions of gender, race and class. These exclusionary power dynamics are key to a fuller understanding of the politics of economic expertise, shaping not only who gets to speak with authorit…
Technocratic reason in hard times: The mobilisation of economic knowledge and the discursive politics of Brexit
In the context of the debate surrounding and following the Brexit referendum in June 2016, credentialed economic expertise did not enjoy a privileged position within the political and policy debate. Using the contrasting cases of the Office for Budget Responsibility and Economists for Brexit/Free Trade, this paper explores the mobilisation of economic expertise within the discursive politics of Brexit under conditions of pervasive radical uncerta…
Introduction: Democracy or dominance? European economic governance in historical perspective
Non-majoritarian institutions: Two strands of liberalism in European economic governance
Remembering and forgetting IPE: Disciplinary history as boundary work
A full understanding of the development and re-production of IPE is only possible with an appreciation of its disciplinary politics. This institutionalises four aspects of academic inquiry: (a) what is considered admissible work in the field, (b) how work should be conducted and where it should be published (c) where the field’s legitimate boundaries are, and (d) ‘external relations’ with cognate disciplines. Academic gatekeepers in positions of …
European Integration and the Politics of Economic Ideas: Economics, Economists and Market Contestation in the Brexit Debate
Debates about the economy are central to political exchange and political choice is typically presented as a matter of selecting among rival economic competence claims. The capacity to speak with authority about the economy or to draw upon accredited economic expertise is an important source of political advantage. However, the Brexit process is a form of politicized market contestation that has taken place against the backdrop of significant cha…
Theorising the EU in crisis: De-Europeanisation as disintegration
The current 'perfect storm' of European crises seems to provide evidence that the EU is suffering from severe tensions that could reverse many of the key integration gains of the past seven decades. The presence of apparently existential threats to the EU has provoked calls to theorise ' dis integration'. This presumes, first and foremost, that scholarship is lagging behind urgent real world developments. It could also be argued that any attempt …
Brexit and the Politics of UK Growth Models
Brexit has reopened and repoliticised the debate about future growth models for the UK economy. This contribution argues that this debate is built around historically specific path dependencies that reflect the particular character of public debate about British political economy, while also suggesting that the debate around Brexit takes place at a very distinctive moment in the history of democratic capitalism in Europe. This combination gives t…
A Different Europe is Possible: The Professionalization of EU Studies and the Dilemmas of Integration in the 21 st Century
We suggest that a renewed focus on integration (broadly conceived) would enablethe field to contemplate the ways in which crisis dynamics interconnect with and amplify three founding and (and unresolved) dilemmas of the European project. These can be summarized as (a) the constant tension between the goal of delivering an EU-wide market order versus the desire to ensure social solidarity, (b) the tension between the development of a legal-constit…
Performing Brexit: How a post-Brexit world is imagined outside the United Kingdom
Theresa May’s claim that ‘Brexit means Brexit’ demonstrates the malleability of the concept. The referendum campaign showed that ‘Brexit’ can be articulated to a variety of post-Brexit scenarios. While it is important to analyse how Brexit gives rise to contestation in the United Kingdom, Brexit is also constructed from the outside. Brexit signifies more than the technical complexities of the United Kingdom withdrawing from the European Union. It…
Post-truth Politics, Bullshit and Bad Ideas: ‘Deficit Fetishism’ in the UK
Debates about economic policy in Britain have been dominated by claims that sovereign debt problems are due to loose fiscal policy and excessive spending rather than volatile capital flows and flawed monetary policy. There are strong grounds for believing that these stories are largely nonsense, yet they inform policy and are widely believed among mass publics, and have proved almost impossible to refute in everyday political discourse. The answe…
Brexit and the Problem of European Disintegration
The Brexit referendum provokes speculation about the likelihood of European disintegration. This article discusses how scholarship might deal with the issue of disintegration and argues that it should be thought of as an indeterminate process rather than an identifiable outcome. Within the EU system, Brexit is likely to unleash disintegrative dynamics, which could see the EU stagnate into a suboptimal institutional equilibrium. At the same time, …
Field of Dreams: The Discursive Construction of EU Studies, Intellectual Dissidence and the Practice of ‘Normal Science
This article explores how and why established understandings of an academic field's history matter. In particular, it shows in the case of EU studies that a settled narrative of the pivotal theoretical debate between neo‐functionalism and intergovernmentalism has been a vital rhetorical tool in the constitution of the field since the 1990s. Drawing on citation data and contemporaneous accounts of the theoretical architecture of the field from the…
Performing Theory/Theorizing Performance in Emergent Supranational Governance: The ‘Live’ Knowledge Archive of European Integration and the Early European Commission
This article considers the entanglement of theories of international politics and international economics on the one hand and an emergent supranational policy actor on the other. The formation of the European Communities in the late 1950s and early 1960s is well known as a moment of radical supranational institutional creation. This is a period in which both economists and political scientists sought to theorize the processes of regional integrat…
Three Ways of Speaking Europe to the World: Markets, Peace, Cosmopolitan Duty and the EU's Normative Power
Research Highlights and Abstract A sympathetic critique of the literature on ‘Normative Power Europe’ that incorporates economic liberalism into the repertoire of the EU's constitutive principles. The derivation of three ideal type liberal modes of justification for external action and a discussion of their potential complementarities and contradictions. An application of the three modes to the case of EU external action. This article—a sympathet…
Greatly exaggerated’: The death of EU studies–new regionalism dialogue? A reply to Jørgensen and Valbjørn
In a recent piece in this journal Jørgensen and Valbjørn develop a typology of intellectual dialogue across fields that yields rather negative conclusions about the prospects for sustainable dialogue between ‘European studies’ and the ‘new regionalism’. This response disputes this pessimistic conclusion. First, it is argued that while their derivation of models of dialogue is impressive, it is nonetheless incomplete. Using Jørgensen and Valbjørn’…
Normative power Europe’ meets economic liberalism: Complicating cosmopolitanism inside/outside the EU
This article offers a reading of ‘normative power Europe’ (NPE) suggesting that the concept has been used for two distinct purposes: as a distinctive ontological characterisation of the EU, on the one hand, and as a critical approach to the study of the EU and its external projection, on the other. These positions are labelled ‘NPE ontological reality’ (NPE-OR) and ‘NPE critical ontology’ (NPE-CO), respectively, and this article sets out to show …
Supranational governance as economic patriotism? The European Union, legitimacy and the reconstruction of state space
Economic patriotism' (EP) and 'European integration' might normally be regarded as antonyms. The argument is made for reading some actions and discourses of the EU in terms of EP. Two assumptions are relaxed: that EP is an exclusive property of nation-state space and that is necessarily associated with the suspension of economic liberalism. By relaxing the first, the article shows how many aspects of EU discourse and practice can be thought of as…
Across the EU Studies–New Regionalism Frontier: Invitation to a Dialogue
This article notes a lack of communication between two broad schools of scholarship on regional integration: EU studies and analyses of the ‘new regionalism’. It is argued that the existence of this divide, which is perpetrated by proponents of both schools, is an impediment to the elaboration of useful theory as well as being a missed opportunity. The benefits and problems of using the EU as a comparator in studies of regionalism are assessed. W…
Open Political Science, Methodological Nationalism and European Union Studies
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
European integration and the social science of EU studies: The Disciplinary Politics of a Subfield
This article takes the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome as an opportunity to reflect upon half a century of academic discourse about the EU and its antecedents. In particular, it illuminates the theoretical analysis of European integration that has developed within political science and international studies broadly defined. It asks whether it is appropriate to map, as might be tempting, the intellectual 'progress' of the field of study aga…
Constitutionalism, European Integration and British Political Economy
Disciplinarity and the political economy of transformation: The epistemological politics of globalization studies
Globalization, the ambivalence of European integration and the possibilities for a post-disciplinary EU studies
Using the work of Manuel Castells as a starting point, this article explores the ambivalent relationship between globalization and European integration and the variety of ways in which the mainstream political science of the EU has attempted to deal with this issue. The analysis here suggests that various 'mainstreaming' disciplinary norms induce types of work that fail to address fully the somewhat paradoxical and counter-intuitive range of poss…
The uniting of Europe and the foundation of EU studies: Revisiting the neofunctionalism of Ernst B. Haas
This article suggests that the neofunctionalist theoretical legacy left by Ernst B. Haas is somewhat richer and more prescient than many contemporary discussants allow. The article develops an argument for routine and detailed re-reading of the corpus of neofunctionalist work (and that of Haas in particular), not only to disabuse contemporary students and scholars of the normally static and stylized reading that discussion of the theory provokes,…
Globalization, European integration and the discursive construction of economic imperatives
While studies of globalization proliferate, we remain relatively under-informed about discourses of globalization and associated issues of power and knowledge. These issues come to the fore in the light of the intensive deployment of particular rhetorics of globalization and European integration within policy-making, journalistic and corporate communities. This paper seeks to contribute to the development of an institutionalist and yet social con…
Theories of European Integration
In this first book-length treatment of integration theory for many years, Ben Rosamond provides an accessible and stimulating critical introduction to the full range of classical and contemporary perspectives. The book explains the centrality of theoretical work to the study of integration and the EU and carefully locates different theories within their wider intellectual and 'real world' contexts. This thoroughly researched book engages with the…
Performing Brexit: How a post-Brexit world is imagined outside the United Kingdom
Theresa May’s claim that ‘Brexit means Brexit’ demonstrates the malleability of the concept. The referendum campaign showed that ‘Brexit’ can be articulated to a variety of post-Brexit scenarios. While it is important to analyse how Brexit gives rise to contestation in the United Kingdom, Brexit is also constructed from the outside. Brexit signifies more than the technical complexities of the United Kingdom withdrawing from the European Union. It…
The uniting of Europe and the foundation of EU studies: Revisiting the neofunctionalism of Ernst B. Haas
This article suggests that the neofunctionalist theoretical legacy left by Ernst B. Haas is somewhat richer and more prescient than many contemporary discussants allow. The article develops an argument for routine and detailed re-reading of the corpus of neofunctionalist work (and that of Haas in particular), not only to disabuse contemporary students and scholars of the normally static and stylized reading that discussion of the theory provokes,…
Imagining the European Economy: Competitiveness' and the Social Construction of 'Europe' as an Economic Space
(2002). Imagining the European Economy: 'Competitiveness' and the Social Construction of 'Europe' as an Economic Space. New Political Economy: Vol. 7, No. 2, pp. 157-177
Across the EU Studies–New Regionalism Frontier: Invitation to a Dialogue
This article notes a lack of communication between two broad schools of scholarship on regional integration: EU studies and analyses of the ‘new regionalism’. It is argued that the existence of this divide, which is perpetrated by proponents of both schools, is an impediment to the elaboration of useful theory as well as being a missed opportunity. The benefits and problems of using the EU as a comparator in studies of regionalism are assessed. W…
Discourses of globalization and the social construction of European identities
Debates within international political economy have revealed the problematic nature of the relationship between globalization and regional economic integration. The literature in European Union studies has tended to treat global context as external and structural to the processes of integration and the Europeanization of governance functions. This article develops a constructivist position on this issue by investigating the operation of discourse…
Brexit and the Problem of European Disintegration
The Brexit referendum provokes speculation about the likelihood of European disintegration. This article discusses how scholarship might deal with the issue of disintegration and argues that it should be thought of as an indeterminate process rather than an identifiable outcome. Within the EU system, Brexit is likely to unleash disintegrative dynamics, which could see the EU stagnate into a suboptimal institutional equilibrium. At the same time, …
Post-truth Politics, Bullshit and Bad Ideas: ‘Deficit Fetishism’ in the UK
Debates about economic policy in Britain have been dominated by claims that sovereign debt problems are due to loose fiscal policy and excessive spending rather than volatile capital flows and flawed monetary policy. There are strong grounds for believing that these stories are largely nonsense, yet they inform policy and are widely believed among mass publics, and have proved almost impossible to refute in everyday political discourse. The answe…
Normative power Europe’ meets economic liberalism: Complicating cosmopolitanism inside/outside the EU
This article offers a reading of ‘normative power Europe’ (NPE) suggesting that the concept has been used for two distinct purposes: as a distinctive ontological characterisation of the EU, on the one hand, and as a critical approach to the study of the EU and its external projection, on the other. These positions are labelled ‘NPE ontological reality’ (NPE-OR) and ‘NPE critical ontology’ (NPE-CO), respectively, and this article sets out to show …
Supranational governance as economic patriotism? The European Union, legitimacy and the reconstruction of state space
Economic patriotism' (EP) and 'European integration' might normally be regarded as antonyms. The argument is made for reading some actions and discourses of the EU in terms of EP. Two assumptions are relaxed: that EP is an exclusive property of nation-state space and that is necessarily associated with the suspension of economic liberalism. By relaxing the first, the article shows how many aspects of EU discourse and practice can be thought of as…
Three Ways of Speaking Europe to the World: Markets, Peace, Cosmopolitan Duty and the EU's Normative Power
Research Highlights and Abstract A sympathetic critique of the literature on ‘Normative Power Europe’ that incorporates economic liberalism into the repertoire of the EU's constitutive principles. The derivation of three ideal type liberal modes of justification for external action and a discussion of their potential complementarities and contradictions. An application of the three modes to the case of EU external action. This article—a sympathet…
A Different Europe is Possible: The Professionalization of EU Studies and the Dilemmas of Integration in the 21 st Century
We suggest that a renewed focus on integration (broadly conceived) would enablethe field to contemplate the ways in which crisis dynamics interconnect with and amplify three founding and (and unresolved) dilemmas of the European project. These can be summarized as (a) the constant tension between the goal of delivering an EU-wide market order versus the desire to ensure social solidarity, (b) the tension between the development of a legal-constit…
Brexit and the Politics of UK Growth Models
Brexit has reopened and repoliticised the debate about future growth models for the UK economy. This contribution argues that this debate is built around historically specific path dependencies that reflect the particular character of public debate about British political economy, while also suggesting that the debate around Brexit takes place at a very distinctive moment in the history of democratic capitalism in Europe. This combination gives t…
Field of Dreams: The Discursive Construction of EU Studies, Intellectual Dissidence and the Practice of ‘Normal Science
This article explores how and why established understandings of an academic field's history matter. In particular, it shows in the case of EU studies that a settled narrative of the pivotal theoretical debate between neo‐functionalism and intergovernmentalism has been a vital rhetorical tool in the constitution of the field since the 1990s. Drawing on citation data and contemporaneous accounts of the theoretical architecture of the field from the…
Remembering and forgetting IPE: Disciplinary history as boundary work
A full understanding of the development and re-production of IPE is only possible with an appreciation of its disciplinary politics. This institutionalises four aspects of academic inquiry: (a) what is considered admissible work in the field, (b) how work should be conducted and where it should be published (c) where the field’s legitimate boundaries are, and (d) ‘external relations’ with cognate disciplines. Academic gatekeepers in positions of …
European integration and the social science of EU studies: The Disciplinary Politics of a Subfield
This article takes the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome as an opportunity to reflect upon half a century of academic discourse about the EU and its antecedents. In particular, it illuminates the theoretical analysis of European integration that has developed within political science and international studies broadly defined. It asks whether it is appropriate to map, as might be tempting, the intellectual 'progress' of the field of study aga…
National Labour Organizations and European Integration: British Trade Unions and ‘1992
The conversion of British trade unions to positive attitudes towards the European Community was a significant feature of British politics in the late 1980s. This article explains the origins of this policy shift and questions the received wisdom that short term opportunism was the primary motivating factor. The British trade union response to ‘1992’ was far from uniform and distinct factions can be identified within a policy coalition. The reason…
European Integration and the Politics of Economic Ideas: Economics, Economists and Market Contestation in the Brexit Debate
Debates about the economy are central to political exchange and political choice is typically presented as a matter of selecting among rival economic competence claims. The capacity to speak with authority about the economy or to draw upon accredited economic expertise is an important source of political advantage. However, the Brexit process is a form of politicized market contestation that has taken place against the backdrop of significant cha…
Babylon and on? Globalization and international political economy
Debates about globalization are now central to the enterprise of IPE. The substantive research agenda of globalization studies has yielded a number of strategies to qualify or refute commonplace claims about globalization found in much policy discourse. Yet the achievements of such scholarship have not induced discernible shifts in the deployment of ‘globalization’ as a key shaper of the realities of contemporary political economy. At an analytic…
Performing Theory/Theorizing Performance in Emergent Supranational Governance: The ‘Live’ Knowledge Archive of European Integration and the Early European Commission
This article considers the entanglement of theories of international politics and international economics on the one hand and an emergent supranational policy actor on the other. The formation of the European Communities in the late 1950s and early 1960s is well known as a moment of radical supranational institutional creation. This is a period in which both economists and political scientists sought to theorize the processes of regional integrat…
Theorising the EU in crisis: De-Europeanisation as disintegration
The current 'perfect storm' of European crises seems to provide evidence that the EU is suffering from severe tensions that could reverse many of the key integration gains of the past seven decades. The presence of apparently existential threats to the EU has provoked calls to theorise ' dis integration'. This presumes, first and foremost, that scholarship is lagging behind urgent real world developments. It could also be argued that any attempt …
Open Political Science, Methodological Nationalism and European Union Studies
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Plagiarism, Academic Norms and the Governance of the Profession
Few would dissent from the view that plagiarism is an academic crime of the worst sort. Attention to the issue has been heightened recently by the growth of websites supplying ‘off the peg’ or customised research papers. This article argues that the definition and detection of plagiarism involves several complexities and that the resolution of the problem depends less on the development of coercive instruments to deal with the ‘crime’ than on the…
Globalization, the ambivalence of European integration and the possibilities for a post-disciplinary EU studies
Using the work of Manuel Castells as a starting point, this article explores the ambivalent relationship between globalization and European integration and the variety of ways in which the mainstream political science of the EU has attempted to deal with this issue. The analysis here suggests that various 'mainstreaming' disciplinary norms induce types of work that fail to address fully the somewhat paradoxical and counter-intuitive range of poss…
Labour and the European Community: Learning to Be European
National Labour Organizations and European Integration: British Trade Unions and ‘1992
The conversion of British trade unions to positive attitudes towards the European Community was a significant feature of British politics in the late 1980s. This article explains the origins of this policy shift and questions the received wisdom that short term opportunism was the primary motivating factor. The British trade union response to ‘1992’ was far from uniform and distinct factions can be identified within a policy coalition. The reason…
Mapping the European Condition: The Theory of Integration and the Integration of Theory
Understanding European unity: The limits of nation‐state‐centric integration theory
(1996). Understanding European unity: The limits of nation‐state‐centric integration theory. The European Legacy: Vol. 1, Fourth International Conference of the International Society for the study of European Ideas, pp. 291-297
Discourses of globalization and the social construction of European identities
Debates within international political economy have revealed the problematic nature of the relationship between globalization and regional economic integration. The literature in European Union studies has tended to treat global context as external and structural to the processes of integration and the Europeanization of governance functions. This article develops a constructivist position on this issue by investigating the operation of discourse…
Theories of European Integration
In this first book-length treatment of integration theory for many years, Ben Rosamond provides an accessible and stimulating critical introduction to the full range of classical and contemporary perspectives. The book explains the centrality of theoretical work to the study of integration and the EU and carefully locates different theories within their wider intellectual and 'real world' contexts. This thoroughly researched book engages with the…
Imagining the European Economy: Competitiveness' and the Social Construction of 'Europe' as an Economic Space
(2002). Imagining the European Economy: 'Competitiveness' and the Social Construction of 'Europe' as an Economic Space. New Political Economy: Vol. 7, No. 2, pp. 157-177
Globalization, European integration and the discursive construction of economic imperatives
While studies of globalization proliferate, we remain relatively under-informed about discourses of globalization and associated issues of power and knowledge. These issues come to the fore in the light of the intensive deployment of particular rhetorics of globalization and European integration within policy-making, journalistic and corporate communities. This paper seeks to contribute to the development of an institutionalist and yet social con…
Plagiarism, Academic Norms and the Governance of the Profession
Few would dissent from the view that plagiarism is an academic crime of the worst sort. Attention to the issue has been heightened recently by the growth of websites supplying ‘off the peg’ or customised research papers. This article argues that the definition and detection of plagiarism involves several complexities and that the resolution of the problem depends less on the development of coercive instruments to deal with the ‘crime’ than on the…
Babylon and on? Globalization and international political economy
Debates about globalization are now central to the enterprise of IPE. The substantive research agenda of globalization studies has yielded a number of strategies to qualify or refute commonplace claims about globalization found in much policy discourse. Yet the achievements of such scholarship have not induced discernible shifts in the deployment of ‘globalization’ as a key shaper of the realities of contemporary political economy. At an analytic…
Globalization, the ambivalence of European integration and the possibilities for a post-disciplinary EU studies
Using the work of Manuel Castells as a starting point, this article explores the ambivalent relationship between globalization and European integration and the variety of ways in which the mainstream political science of the EU has attempted to deal with this issue. The analysis here suggests that various 'mainstreaming' disciplinary norms induce types of work that fail to address fully the somewhat paradoxical and counter-intuitive range of poss…
The uniting of Europe and the foundation of EU studies: Revisiting the neofunctionalism of Ernst B. Haas
This article suggests that the neofunctionalist theoretical legacy left by Ernst B. Haas is somewhat richer and more prescient than many contemporary discussants allow. The article develops an argument for routine and detailed re-reading of the corpus of neofunctionalist work (and that of Haas in particular), not only to disabuse contemporary students and scholars of the normally static and stylized reading that discussion of the theory provokes,…
Constitutionalism, European Integration and British Political Economy
Disciplinarity and the political economy of transformation: The epistemological politics of globalization studies
European integration and the social science of EU studies: The Disciplinary Politics of a Subfield
This article takes the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome as an opportunity to reflect upon half a century of academic discourse about the EU and its antecedents. In particular, it illuminates the theoretical analysis of European integration that has developed within political science and international studies broadly defined. It asks whether it is appropriate to map, as might be tempting, the intellectual 'progress' of the field of study aga…
Open Political Science, Methodological Nationalism and European Union Studies
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Across the EU Studies–New Regionalism Frontier: Invitation to a Dialogue
This article notes a lack of communication between two broad schools of scholarship on regional integration: EU studies and analyses of the ‘new regionalism’. It is argued that the existence of this divide, which is perpetrated by proponents of both schools, is an impediment to the elaboration of useful theory as well as being a missed opportunity. The benefits and problems of using the EU as a comparator in studies of regionalism are assessed. W…
Supranational governance as economic patriotism? The European Union, legitimacy and the reconstruction of state space
Economic patriotism' (EP) and 'European integration' might normally be regarded as antonyms. The argument is made for reading some actions and discourses of the EU in terms of EP. Two assumptions are relaxed: that EP is an exclusive property of nation-state space and that is necessarily associated with the suspension of economic liberalism. By relaxing the first, the article shows how many aspects of EU discourse and practice can be thought of as…
Three Ways of Speaking Europe to the World: Markets, Peace, Cosmopolitan Duty and the EU's Normative Power
Research Highlights and Abstract A sympathetic critique of the literature on ‘Normative Power Europe’ that incorporates economic liberalism into the repertoire of the EU's constitutive principles. The derivation of three ideal type liberal modes of justification for external action and a discussion of their potential complementarities and contradictions. An application of the three modes to the case of EU external action. This article—a sympathet…
Greatly exaggerated’: The death of EU studies–new regionalism dialogue? A reply to Jørgensen and Valbjørn
In a recent piece in this journal Jørgensen and Valbjørn develop a typology of intellectual dialogue across fields that yields rather negative conclusions about the prospects for sustainable dialogue between ‘European studies’ and the ‘new regionalism’. This response disputes this pessimistic conclusion. First, it is argued that while their derivation of models of dialogue is impressive, it is nonetheless incomplete. Using Jørgensen and Valbjørn’…
Normative power Europe’ meets economic liberalism: Complicating cosmopolitanism inside/outside the EU
This article offers a reading of ‘normative power Europe’ (NPE) suggesting that the concept has been used for two distinct purposes: as a distinctive ontological characterisation of the EU, on the one hand, and as a critical approach to the study of the EU and its external projection, on the other. These positions are labelled ‘NPE ontological reality’ (NPE-OR) and ‘NPE critical ontology’ (NPE-CO), respectively, and this article sets out to show …
Performing Theory/Theorizing Performance in Emergent Supranational Governance: The ‘Live’ Knowledge Archive of European Integration and the Early European Commission
This article considers the entanglement of theories of international politics and international economics on the one hand and an emergent supranational policy actor on the other. The formation of the European Communities in the late 1950s and early 1960s is well known as a moment of radical supranational institutional creation. This is a period in which both economists and political scientists sought to theorize the processes of regional integrat…
Brexit and the Problem of European Disintegration
The Brexit referendum provokes speculation about the likelihood of European disintegration. This article discusses how scholarship might deal with the issue of disintegration and argues that it should be thought of as an indeterminate process rather than an identifiable outcome. Within the EU system, Brexit is likely to unleash disintegrative dynamics, which could see the EU stagnate into a suboptimal institutional equilibrium. At the same time, …
Field of Dreams: The Discursive Construction of EU Studies, Intellectual Dissidence and the Practice of ‘Normal Science
This article explores how and why established understandings of an academic field's history matter. In particular, it shows in the case of EU studies that a settled narrative of the pivotal theoretical debate between neo‐functionalism and intergovernmentalism has been a vital rhetorical tool in the constitution of the field since the 1990s. Drawing on citation data and contemporaneous accounts of the theoretical architecture of the field from the…
Performing Brexit: How a post-Brexit world is imagined outside the United Kingdom
Theresa May’s claim that ‘Brexit means Brexit’ demonstrates the malleability of the concept. The referendum campaign showed that ‘Brexit’ can be articulated to a variety of post-Brexit scenarios. While it is important to analyse how Brexit gives rise to contestation in the United Kingdom, Brexit is also constructed from the outside. Brexit signifies more than the technical complexities of the United Kingdom withdrawing from the European Union. It…
Political science (33 works) · Economics (27 works) · European Union Policy and Governance (26 works) · Law (26 works) · Law (26 works) · Sociology (26 works) · Politics (24 works) · Political economy (19 works) · European union (18 works) · Social Policy and Reform Studies (17 works)