International relations scholarship on the European Union and EU law: ships passing in the night?

Abstract

From the dominant points of view in theories of International Relations (IR), the European Union (EU) is a phenomenon both difficult to comprehend and precarious. Depending on the specific school of thought, scholars would expect European integration to fail, due to (a) the persistent dominance of nation states and their struggle for relative power, (b) divergent interests among member states combined with a failure to shape an institutional order that could successfully manage this divergence, or (c) the failure to develop a shared identity across member states. Those (fewer) IR scholars who are truly convinced of the EU’s long-term significance are divided into three camps: integration idealists, left-wing Eurosceptics and right-wing Eurosceptics. That leaves very few integration pragmatists, and much in the dominant IR positions is counterintuitive, to say the least, for students of EU law. This chapter maps out the IR community’s takes on European integration and relates them to scholarship on European integration and EU law. Where and how do these literatures speak past one another? Where and how could they learn from and build on each other instead