19 - Elite Networks of Allegiance

Summary

The narrative of European integration was long dominated by the role of the participating member states, as personified in their respective presidents and prime ministers, in forging an ever-expanding set of institutions and an increasingly dense legal framework. This orthodox view saw nation states at the centre of the process, gradually pooling sovereignty to construct an ever-closer union. Analyses have differed as to the driving forces behind these processes. Debates in the 1990s between advocates of intergovernmentalism and supranationalism as the guiding explanatory frameworks still focused on an apparently self-contained European context, although the role of non-state actors did begin to feature more in the analysis. In contrast, more recent scholarship has contested the way the history of European integration has generally been framed in isolation from wider social, economic and political developments. Repositioning the processes of European integration in a global context requires that Europe as an historical entity be ‘provincialised’.