Positioning the Dominant Accounts of EU History

Craig Parsons

Associate Professor of Political Science

University of Oregon

cap@uoregon.edu / tel. 541.346.4402

ROUGH DRAFT. DO NOT CITE.

Prepared for presentation at the conference of the European Union Studies Association,

Boston, MA, March 3-6, 2011.

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NOTE TO EUSA 2011 READERS: Apologies are in order. I have not delivered on

my original paper idea, “Revealed Methods in EU History,” which meant to offer a

broad survey of how political scientists and historians have matched evidence to

their claims about why the EU arose and took the shape it did. Instead I only

provide a methodological critique of the three best-known arguments about how the

EU arose: Andrew Moravcsik’s liberal intergovernmentalism, Haasian

institutionalism, and Alan Milward’s “rescue of the nation-state” argument. I am

aware that most of EU-focused history has moved on from the tired problems of

these works, but this drafty, incompletely-cited set of criticisms is what I was able to

put together. At best it is worthwhile as a sharp and interrelated way of seeing the

failings of the “old schools.” At worst it just serves as my carte d’entrée to what I

hope will be an interesting panel discussion.

As a graduate student at Berkeley, I planned and even received outside funding for a

contemporary, standard-political-science dissertation project about the EU Structural

Funds and how they were affecting national-subnational relations in Europe—a subject

that was all the rage in the mid-1990s. But then for a seminar paper I found myself

reading two famous books by the historian Alan Milward—The Reconstruction of

Western Europe, 1945-1951 (Milward 1984) and the celebrated European Rescue of the

Nation-State (Milward 1992)—and I had such a reaction that I stumbled onto a path to an

entirely different dissertation about EU history. Fortunately no one held me to spending

my dissertation funding as I had originally proposed.

What struck me about Milward‘s work, besides being as impressed as everyone else

by someone who could read a dozen languages and had been in every archive, was an

odd disjuncture between evidence and argument. The kernel idea for my seminar paper

had been to look at the range of early institutional plans for postwar European institutions

and different ways of thinking about the mechanisms that had selected between them, and

though Milward was the single best published source for information about that range of

options and debate, his own argument about selection mechanisms seemed to glide over

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that rich information without touching it very much. In particular, it seemed to me that

the main body of his chapters offered nuanced empirical portrayals of the options and

debates over European plans, in which we saw political players fighting hotly over quite

different agendas or models, but then the summary statements that began and ended

chapters declared rather breezily that something like ―national interest‖ had clearly

selected one outcome. We were not shown that the proponents of alternative plans

recognized the rightness of the eventual choice, nor that its champions were somehow

more essentially or broadly representative of ―national interest.‖ I could not understand

how Milward thought that his story matched the contents of his books.

I began to look for this kind of disjuncture elsewhere. Andrew Moravcsik reigned

over EU studies in political science at the time, and it looked to me like he had a version

of the same problem. His evidence was far less rich than Milward‘s—he was, after all,

writing for political scientists with less patience for detail and narrative—but he similarly

seemed to toss a ―national interest‖ framework over empirics that did not even try

seriously to show us a national interest. Even before I could get my hands on his long-

awaited book, The Choice for Europe (Moravcsik 1998) this issue was visible in his

landmark article about the Single European Act (Moravcsik 1991). At the core of that

account was the French ―economic U-turn‖ and a tale of François Mitterrand‘s ―road to

Damascus‖ conversion from Socialist strategic to Europeanist statesman. Moravcsik was

obviously right that Mitterrand‘s personal thinking about Europe was central to French

choices and the SEA outcome, but the article made little effort to present evidence of

much beyond Mitterrand‘s personal thinking. I was puzzled by the notion that any

amount of evidence of Mitterrand‘s thinking, no matter how important he was, could be

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seen as direct evidence of ―French national interests.‖ Moravcsik gave us little leverage

on how we should relate Mitterrand‘s power and choices to claims about national interest.

These critiques led me to my dissertation, which for a painfully long period remained

only a critique: I piled up more and more evidence of contestation and debate and

Machiavellian maneuvering about the selection of plans for European institutions over

time (focusing mainly in France), and it was clear that this evidence did not map onto a

story about clear national interests. Finally, though, it sorted out into a coherent

alternative story about how the EU came to be in A Certain Idea of Europe (Parsons

2003). Along the way arose a sharpened methodological critique about how some other

scholars had approached this task of historical explanation, and a sociology-of-

knowledge view about why they did not perceive these evidentiary disjunctures. The

revealed methods of the leading political scientists and historians writing on EU

history—the methods they actually followed, as opposed to the methods they sometimes

announced—displayed a collective and systematic failure to seek the patterns in political

action implied by their own arguments. They did so, I suspected, partly because they did

not take seriously any ―ideational‖ alternative arguments that would have led them to

pose more open-ended questions about patterns in political action.

Matching Argument and Evidence in EU History

Historians and political scientists often care about somewhat different things, are trained

in different methods, and write mostly for different audiences. That said, a given kind of

explanatory claim has the same logical (and so methodological) implications no matter

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who makes it. The explanatory claims of Milward, Moravcsik, and some of the other

most strongly-phrased arguments about EU history fall into a single broad logical

category, and the problems that I stumbled upon in graduate school concern the

evidentiary foundations of this shared category.

The broad category is most commonly referred to as arguments based on ―interests,‖

though I think a more substantive label is that they are arguments of ―position.‖ Most

social-science and historical work since the 19th

century explains what people do as fairly

rational responses to their objective position in some sort of unambiguous obstacle course

around them. Political action varies not with different interpretations of the world but

with the resources people hold and the relative position they inhabit in arenas like

markets, security competitions, or contests for domestic political power. The most classic

versions of such explanatory thinking are materialist—Marxism, realism, and the kind of

economic liberalism underlying modern economics—where the obstacle course is

presented as a set of structural givens. More recent, but now very well established, is the

kind of institutionalist work that emphasizes man-made organizational aspects of the

obstacle course. Its focus on a man-made environment leads to a stress on feedback and

―path dependence,‖ but otherwise its core logic shares some features of structural

materialism.1 Both rest on the expectation that the main patterns of politics will follow

from groups of people who share positioning (and so clear ―interests‖) in an objective

landscape. The most salient debates in postwar political science have been about the

shape of the obstacle course, which positions dictate which actions, and which position-

action logics predominate where (Parsons 2007). The same is true of most historians

1There are other ―institutionalisms‖ with other logics, but the core of both ―rationalist institutionalism‖ and

―historical institutionalism‖ fits my description.

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writing about the EU, even if the broader discipline of history took a major ―linguistic

turn‖ and ―cultural turn‖ beginning in the 1970s. Their most sustained debate concerns

whether it was economic positioning (usually, as for Milward, in a liberal theoretical

conception) or geopolitical positioning (a realist view, as in Hitchcock 1998) that

channeled Europeans to the EU project.

The two main political-science explanations of the rise of the EU are ideal-typical

examples of the structural and institutional variants of positional traditions. One is

Moravcsik‘s ―liberal intergovernmentalist‖ (LI) theory, which became the obligatory

point of departure for theoretical work on the EU by the 1990s. LI explains the EU

institutions as a function of economic-liberal-style market structure and an exogenously-

given territorial patchwork of sovereign states. Its foundations are domestic economic

interest groups who derive their main preferences from a position in markets (domestic

and international). A pluralistic domestic process informs state policies: ―Groups

formulate preferences; governments aggregate them‖ (Moravcsik 1993). Demand for

integration thus come from domestic actors who stand to gain economically from new

international arrangements. States are reluctant to delegate their sovereignty, but will

carefully bargain with other states to the extent that international cooperation is necessary

to realize their domestic lobbies‘ policy preferences. Larger and more powerful states get

more of what they want in bargaining. The substantive shape of these deals in turn

determines the delegation of power to European-level institutions. The more international

policy commitments raise problems of defection, the more governments will give up

policy control and sovereignty to binding institutions that render the policy commitments

more credible. Overall, everyone in Europe figured out what was best for them given

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their positions in markets and state organizations, and a rather straightforward

aggregation of these positions (with recognition of their relative strengths, intensities and

interdependencies) gave us each step toward the EU.

The other major political science approach is institutionalist work that follows from

the early ―neofunctionalist‖ theory of Ernst Haas. In its clearest and most ambitious

codification (Sandholtz and Stone Sweet 1998), it too begins from economic-liberal

structural thinking. Haas used interest groups as ―the building blocks of a theory of

politics,‖ and many later institutionalists argue that Haas ―got it right‖ on this score (Haas

1964, 30-50; Burley and Mattli 1993, 54; Sandholtz and Stone Sweet 1998, 5). Growing

transnational exchange creates societal actors ―who need supranational governance‖ to

further their (mainly economic) interests (Sandholtz and Stone Sweet 1998, 11). Unlike

LI, however, institutionalists allow that interest-group demands can be realized in a

variety of ways, and that state or supranational actors have their own agendas and use

their institutional positions to craft certain interest-group coalitions. Supranational agents

in particular persuade or outmaneuver reluctant national governments to meet interest-

group demands in ways that expand supranational rules and policies. Such extensions

prove difficult to reverse, notably because backward movement in EU policy-making

usually requires member-state unanimity. Thus a combination of transnational

mobilization, supranational actors, and ―sticky‖ institutional rules engenders a ―self-

sustaining dynamic‖ (Sandholtz and Stone Sweet 1998, 4-5). New supranational rules

feed back to encourage further mobilization of societal actors at the European level. The

largely unintended effects of supranational institutionalization ―gradually, but inevitably,

reduce the capacity of the member-states to control outcomes‖ (Sandholtz and Stone

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Sweet 1998, 4). In this story, then, everyone in Europe figured out what was best for

them given their positioning in markets and an evolving organizational obstacle-course,

and the aggregation of these positions gave us the steps toward the EU.

Among historians of the EU, Milward is the clearest exemplar of a strong positional

logic. This is directly related to the aggressiveness of his argument: his claim is that

postwar western European nation-states were ―rescued‖ by a particular set of

mechanisms, presumably meaning that they would have suffered some sort of

cataclysmic failure without the early European Communities. Most EU historians (like,

say, John Gillingham, Piers Ludlow, Wilfried Loth, Gérard Bossuat, Wolfram Kaiser,

Richard Griffiths, or Anne Deighton) shy away from the kinds of terms found at the end

of Milward‘s critical chapter on the EEC treaty in European Rescue (with my added

italics): ―It we ask why Europe had to be ‗organized‘ in this particular way the answer

seems clear. The will of the European nation-state to survive as an organizational entity

depended on the prosperity which sustained the domestic post-war political compromises

everywhere…. [Europe] needed an arrangement that satisfied the economic interests of

Western European countries in a durable way…The common market was the one durable

way that had been found‖ (Milward 1992, 223). In a reversal of Moravcsik‘s conception

of people positioned first in markets and then aggregated through a geopolitical

framework of states, Milward starts from people positioned politically in nation-states, in

which they have all sorts of vested interests and commitments, and then argues that the

higher-level positioning of nation-states in economic interdependence required specific

kinds of European cooperation if national governments were to continue to maintain

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control over their populations.2 In other words, Moravcsik tells a story about how market

actors (interest groups) confronted certain constraints and incentives in an evolving

structural landscape and, through a great deal of political aggregation, eventually ended

up getting more economic benefits; Milward tells a story about how political actors

(national policy-makers) confronted certain constraints and incentives in an evolving

structural landscape and, through a great deal of political wrangling, ended up with

processes of coordination that allowed them to deliver effective policies. Still, the

objective clarity of the landscape and people‘s position within it is very similar in the two

accounts. In Milward‘s summary statements the landscape is presented as dictating

specific ―national interests‖ and the eventual outcome even more tightly and inevitably

than in Moravcsik‘s.

Each of these arguments is itself a theoretical accomplishment of the first order.

Moravcsik, the Haasian institutionalists, and Milward each provide a theoretical story

that is a clear, coherent, relatively plausible way to understand the important and striking

tale of the greatest voluntary delegations of state sovereignty in history. All draw on and

contribute to broader theoretical conceptions that help us to locate this seemingly-unique

European adventure in the conditions and challenges around the end of the second

millennium. But major problems arose, unfortunately, as the proponents of each of these

arguments took their claims into the field. At a quite basic level, though in different ways,

they did not adopt methodologies that connected to the positional logic of their

arguments.

2See also David Andrews‘ excellent dissection of differences between Milward and Moravcsik in his paper

presented at this conference.

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Consider first the case of Moravcsik, who invites strong methodological scrutiny by

declaring that he showcases ―the proper use of qualitative methods in explaining

contemporary history‖ (Moravcsik 2000b). Moravcsik has been roundly criticized for the

quality of his historical evidence, most notably by Dutch historians who dissected his

footnotes (Lieshout et al 2004) but also by many others (among many, Kaiser 2008;

Parsons 2003, 29), by that is not my object here. Prior to and separate from any problems

in Moravcsik‘s use of sources and citations, we can evaluate the choices he made about

the kinds of evidence to gather to test and support his theory.

From the logic of his theory, one might expect his 700-page book (Moravcsik 1998,

which is also printed in unusual formatting to fit in more words) or his two-part, 106-

page article that developed one of the book‘s chapters (Moravcsik 2000a, 2000b, on the

EEC policies of Charles de Gaulle) to focus on evidence of real positioning in an

objective landscape: things like levels of trade dependence and relative competitiveness

of key interest groups, evidence that interest groups perceived certain European options

as beneficial and interacted accordingly with their governments, and evidence that people

in government perceived these societal interests and demands and transferred them into

policy. We would not expect a major focus on the thinking of particular individuals,

except as part of an effort to demonstrate that the thinking of leaders like de Gaulle,

Adenauer, Mitterrand, Kohl, and so on reflected the national positioning they shared with

their compatriots.

Yet in all of Moravcsik‘s work the reliance on these kinds of evidence is the reverse

of these expectations. The vast majority of his empirical work focuses on exegesis of the

thinking of top national leaders, with very little systematic attention to any other actors.

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In the long de Gaulle essay, for example, only six of 106 pages mention anything that

could be called evidence of an explicit view or demand of any French actor besides de

Gaulle himself (Moravcsik 2000a, 2000b)! Such evidence is not irrelevant to Moravcsik‘s

argument—it is hard to tell this story without plenty of attention to Charles de Gaulle—

but it gives us little leverage for or against a claim that ―French economic interests‖ drove

specific policy decisions. To know how much de Gaulle‘s thinking connected to

rationally-perceived objective interests in a concrete landscape, we need to know how

much other people in similar positions agreed with him. If de Gaulle in fact disagreed

with people in similar positions—farmers, businesspeople, relevant policy-makers,

connected politicians, and others depending on the various steps in the argument—then

no amount of rhetorical evidence that the French President was concerned with

economics can support the conclusion that clear, rationally-perceived ―French interests‖

selected these policies. De Gaulle‘s thinking is evidence of de Gaulle‘s understanding of

French interests, not of French interests.

This problem characterizes Moravcsik‘s scholarship across the board. In no part of

his work is there significant evidence of the broad patterns that ostensibly drive his

argument. We find nothing on levels of interdependence for identifiably specific actors or

relative competitiveness of groups beyond extremely crude measures like trade as a

proportion of GDP. Interdependence and competitiveness seem to be taken as revealed in

actors‘ political demands for certain European options. Even patterns of those political

demands themselves, however, receive a very modest level of scrutiny. In The Choice for

Europe, interest groups‘ positions are summarized in quick sentences without significant

context—like presenting French farmers as key supporters of EEC without noting that

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their government had to lobby them intensively to become so, or presenting French

business as supporting the European Monetary System without noting that they

repeatedly expressed opposition to the kind of disciplined EMS deal that was eventually

agreed. Overall, he tries to tell a theoretical story that is about interest groups and broadly

patterned ―national interests‖ by showing us mainly what a few national leaders were

thinking.

Institutionalist political scientists writing on the EU showcase a related misfit of

theory and evidence, if to a less egregious degree. Consider the most prominent episode

for most recent EU-focused institutionalism: the role of Commission President Jacques

Delors in crafting the Single European Act. Even Moravcsik allows that this story

features some institutional path-dependence (Moravcsik 1999). Earlier delegations of

power to the Commission created the opening for Delors‘ supranational entrepreneurship

in crafting the SEA deal, and his action altered national interests and bargaining. To show

that this logic captured a major part of the causality behind the SEA, we would want to

document several patterns. First we would show that national-government strategies at

some prior point were not close to an SEA-like deal in some sense. Next we would show

that it was exposure to activity from Delors and the Commission, not other factors, that

altered these strategies. To make this an argument about an institutional actor called the

European Commission affecting the ―interests‖ of national governments as collective

actors, we would presumably check to see that officials in any given national government

received Commission proposals in similar ways. If members of a national government

did not—with some finding Delors‘ proposals persuasive and others rejecting them—we

could hardly argue that Commission proposals were clearly altering ―national

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government interests.‖ Instead we would have to look for some other factors that

explained the differential appeal of Delors‘ action. Delors‘ proposals might only have

convinced certain parties, certain ministries, those with certain connections to certain

sectors, or perhaps only people who shared some other sort of positional or ideological

disposition.

Yet most of these steps are absent from the large institutionalist literature on the SEA

(Corbett 1987; Sandholtz and Zysman 1989; Cameron 1992; Fligstein and Mara-Drita

1996; even Jabko 2006). Rather than looking for the patterns suggested by their theory,

they trace a dynamic of entrepreneurship and persuasion through a small set of actors,

much as Moravcsik does. They focus their main attention on Delors being innovative and

persuasive, with some attention to the reception of his ideas by a few top leaders. But no

institutionalist account looks systematically inside national governments to see how these

ideas were received more broadly. Thus they miss that in France, for example, most

officials in the Foreign Ministry, the relevant technical ministries, and even several

members of the French SEA negotiating team opposed the SEA‘s institutional reforms

that Delors proposed (Parsons 2003, 193-194). This does not entirely undercut the notion

that the Commission‘s institutional position gave Delors some influence—it gave him

access to key top leaders—but it does strongly cut back how much we see this story as an

interaction of the Commission-as-institution and national-governments-as-institutions. To

put it simply, Delors and the Commission did not alter how many national officials and

politicians saw their interests (Parsons 2010).

And Milward? We might expect a lauded economic historian to do better than

political scientists at studying the patterns and context for political decision-making, and

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that Milward undeniably does. His books are full of various kinds of data about economic

interdependence, competitiveness, and economic and social policy challenges; in no way

can he be accused of just following around his favorite actors in the way that Moravcsik

follows top national leaders or institutionalists follow the Commission. Yet his argument

suffers from a similar methodological failure to fill in the evidentiary connections from a

positional logic to the outcomes in question. For Milward, evidentiary gaps open up in

two places. One is in moving from evidence of underlying structural problems for people

in certain positions to evidence that people‘s views corresponded, at least roughly, to

these positions. Not only does a positional argument need to show us evidence that

people in a certain position faced some sort of problem, constraint, or incentive, it needs

to show us that the people in that position themselves perceived the problems, and

hopefully that most of the people in that same position agreed on that perception. And

once Milward has failed to show us that people in similar positions shared perceptions of

their problems—and, to the contrary, he frequently provides reams of evidence that they

did not—he leaps a second gap between his actors‘ perceptions and outcomes. He pays

practically no attention at all to how any government or society moved from a debate

over policy positions to the eventual acceptance of a certain outcome. He seems to imply

that after some initial thrashing about, everyone just saw the light of national interest.

To step away from the French examples on which my own research has focused for at

least a few paragraphs, consider Milward‘s tale of Belgium and the European Coal and

Steel Community (ECSC). For him it is a story of how the ECSC provided political

support and cover for the Belgian government to gradually phase out of its declining coal

sector while keeping up key political bargains. He concludes his chapter, looking back

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from the vantage point of the mid-1950s, by arguing that the driving force of the story

was ―the tide of international economic change‖ and that ―the Belgian government had

judged correctly in 1950 that integration would provide needed, and unembarrassing,

support for combining the management of industrial decline with high welfare and high

employment‖ (1992, 118).

Even in the chapter conclusion, though, there are hints that this isn‘t a story of clear-

eyed national interest: ――The way that tide was setting,‖ he allows, ―was more clearly

recognized in the ECSC than in the national government in Brussels. But the Community

could do little more than nudge Belgium to swim with it rather than against it‖ (1992,

118). And at the beginning of the chapter, the way that he narrates Belgian position-

taking around the ―correct‖ judgment in 1950 also seems to emphasize that most relevant

Belgians did not perceive it as correct. ―Had Belgium understood in advance the nature

and contents of the working document which was to be drawn up by Monnet and his

associates as the sole initial base for the negotiations,‖ he begins, ―it would ‗in all

probability‘ have taken the same attitude as the United Kingdom and refused to negotiate

from that basis‖ (1992, 64).3 After a second look, then, we see that Milward‘s argument

is not that Belgium spontaneously identified something like the ECSC as in their national

interests, but that they took an unwelcome proposal and beat it into a shape that fit with

their national interests.

But even with this important modification, this story finds little echo in Milward‘s

presentation of evidence about Belgian perceptions and decision-making. We do see

Belgians (and other Europeans) beating back Monnet‘s initial pie-in-the-sky ideas in a

3The internal cite is a quote by François Vinck, head of the Fuel and Energy Administration in the Belgian

Ministry of Economic Affairs, later in the 1950s.

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variety of ways, but we do not see the Belgians agreeing about which modifications were

acceptable or desirable, or whether the final treaty sufficiently allayed their earlier

concerns. Thus Milward writes that late in the ECSC negotiations, ―The attitude of the

Belgian government as a body at the time and its actions afterwards must call into

question the firmness of its commitment to the terms of the treaty and the adjustment

required‖ (1992, 74). Immediately following are long paragraphs that emphasize the very

different views of key figures: Foreign Minister Paul Van Zeeland ―admittedly saw the

foreign policy aspects of the treaty as more important than its domestic implications‖ and

supported it early on (74); Minister for Foreign Trade Joseph Maurice took a much more

―chauvinistic‖ attitude that the deal was unattractive; Minister for Economic Affairs

Albert Coppé was on record calling for international coal cartel as far back as 1939 and

saw the ECSC deal as acceptable to keep the Belgian coal industry in place; François

Vinck, head of the Fuel and Energy Administration in Coppé‘s ministry, held ―the

contrary view‖ that the whole point of the deal was an anti-cartel plan and ―that it was the

task of the ECSC to reduce its size and improve its productivity overall‖(76). Next we

learn that ―The attitude towards the future Community of Belgian political parties was as

ambivalent as that of the government… (76); ―As for the Socialists they covered a wide

spectrum of opinion, from militant federalists like [Paul-Henri] Spaak, who was in favor

of the treaty on the simple grounds that it brought nearer the federal Europe which he

now preached, to the former prime minister van Acker who strongly opposed the

Schuman Plan‖ (77); ―The same divisions could be seen in the trade union

movement…Ambivalence reached its heights inside the Christian trade unions…‖ (77)

―Only the management of the coal industry itself…seemed entirely unambivalent in its

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public utterances‖—but it was notable for its ―seemingly implacable, intemperate and

increasing public opposition‖ and ―ferociously nationalistic diatribes‖ (77).

How did this conflicted, largely skeptical or hostile Belgium end up getting ―rescued‖

by the ECSC? Belgium did eventually sign and ratify the treaty, with a Senate vote of

102 to 4 (with 58 abstentions from Socialists, who were too deeply split) and a lower

House of vote of 191 to 13 (13 abstentions). Milward does not tell us the story of how

Belgian got to these votes, except to emphasize a point that undercuts his argument. In

the Belgian parliamentary debates, he writes, ―It was taken for granted that peace

between France and Germany was essential for Belgium‘s security, and that this was the

strongest reason for accession to the treaty. After that acceptance it was vital to ensure

that Belgium‘s other national interests were not trampled into the ground in the rush of

the French, Germans and Americans to find a common framework for the future‖ (1992,

83). In other words, all the preceding discussion of ―coal and the Belgian nation‖ was

swamped by broader diplomatic concerns. The best that Milward can say about how well

the ECSC solved Belgium‘s national coal problems was that its national interests were

not ―trampled into the ground.‖

A future version of this paper will extend this discussion to other historians, though

very few of them deserve anything like this criticism of Milward. Probably the most

similar major historical work comes from Milward‘s wife, Frances Lynch, who often also

makes strong claims about what had to happen on the basis of an underlying analysis of

economic policy challenges. Most other historical work on the EU refrains from making

such aggressive explanatory claims. If we read Piers Ludlow on the de Gaulle period, for

example, we find consistent phrasing that underscores that de Gaulle‘s views are de

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Gaulle‘s views, and similarly for other actors (Ludlow 1997). He writes of what ―the

French government‖ wanted only when he is describing official French positions, and

does not slip from de Gaulle or official positions to claims about what ―France‖ wanted

or needed. Political scientists might feel that Ludlow, like many careful historians, could

stick out his neck a bit further in making specific causal-explanatory claims. But since he

is mostly content to assemble what people said and did into a coherent narrative, without

taking that step into strong causal claims, he cannot be accused of methodological

failures to support such claims. The same is largely true of the early work of John

Gillingham (though on occasion his more grand writing style gives him hints of Milward,

and this style took over his later work), and is very true of scholars like Richard Griffiths,

Gérard Bossuat, Anne Deighton, or Wolfram Kaiser.

But Milward remains the towering figure on this subject, and so a criticism that

applies mainly to him remains important for how historians approach the EU. It also

seems worthwhile to me to point out that the most celebrated historian of the EU shares a

kind of fundamental problem with the best-established political-science explanations of

the EU. As we have seen, political scientists make one version of this error, while the

historian makes another. Political scientists fail to connect their positional arguments to

evidence because they mainly traced the action and thinking of top political elites,

without doing extensive research on patterns of action and positioning across societies. In

other words, they mostly present what is known as ―process tracing‖ evidence—which is

often what political scientists criticize in historians! Milward offers much more research

on patterns of positioning—trying to display the patterns of constraints and challenges

broadly faced by European policy-makers—but fails to connect his positional argument

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to evidence because he does not show us that similarly-positioned actors agreed on the

implications of their positioning, or even that they worked their way to similar views of

their positional ―interests‖ over time. In other words, he makes little effort to tell a story

about what people actually thought and how their interaction came together in history—

which is often what historians criticize in political scientists! But both remain

manifestations of the same problem. The theoretical logic is positional, but the overall

package of evidence is substantially not.

A Short, Speculative, and Snarky Sociology of Knowledge: Why the Disjunctures?

The question I now pose can only receive a speculative answer, but it seems important to

ask. How did these extremely intelligent, well-informed, methodologically-trained

scholars find themselves glossing past the logical steps of their own arguments? Given

Moravcsik‘s announced aspiration to be a defining model for historical method, these

systematic methodological missteps are much more remarkable than his empirical

problems with sources and footnotes. Milward also seemed unaware of such issues. As a

graduate student I went and talked with him in Florence about my attempt to document a

pattern of ideological debates in France over various European projects. He was very nice

and helpful, directing me to this archive here and another source there. But I was puzzled

that he did not seem to see my claims as even a mild challenge to his own work.

In my view, scholars who make coherent arguments but do not offer appropriate

evidence for them most often do so because they do not perceive or recognize as

legitimate some alternative arguments. They rest their cases on incomplete or poorly-

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chosen evidence because they have not seriously considered another way of reading the

same evidence. In the dominant accounts of EU history, it seems to me that the

unrecognized alternative that facilitated these oversights was ideational explanation. To

some degree the fact that these scholars did not question their own positional patterns

reflected the exclusion of ideational theorizing as a serious competitor for many decades.

Why would inattention to ideational competitors have this effect? Ideational

arguments—whether phrased as arguments about ―ideas,‖ ―culture,‖ norms, discourse,

practices, identities, or whatever else—carry the implication that actors‘ perceptions and

strategies of action do not simply reduce to their position in an objective obstacle course.

In other words, they imply that perception and action can vary for ideational reasons that

have some autonomy from objective positioning. They instruct us to problematize

whether any given person‘s action and rhetoric is a simple function of her straightforward

location in salient incentives and constraints.

This is not at all to say that Moravcsik, Milward, or anyone else could only make a

methodologically-sharp argument if they accept an ideational or ―constructivist‖ view of

some sort. The point is just that if they accepted that they should entertain some variant

of ideational thinking as an alternative to their arguments, they would encounter more

pressing reasons to document closely their theoretical claims that action tends to follow

unproblematically from some sort of clear, demonstrable positioning.

Yet this basic notion of potential non-positional variation in action was absent from

both political-science and historical debates about the rise of the EU for several decades.

Today‘s dominant explanations of the rise of the EU developed in debates that were

limited to competing positional claims. In political science, Ernst Haas created the new

20

subfield of integration theory at a time when the young political science discipline was

emerging mainly in the United States and very strongly under the influence of a

simplistic scientism and the ―systems‖-style thinking of Talcott Parsons. Though Parsons

had translated Weber into English, his influence largely erased Weber‘s serious treatment

of ideas and culture from the tool kit of American political scientists (see Janos 1986),

both by downgrading the role of ideas in Weber‘s inheritance and by making such weak

cultural arguments that the entire category was delegitimated. In Parsons‘ universe, ideas

and culture took the place either of an effect—since most Parsonian arguments boiled

down to a systems-based rephrasing of classic liberal-pluralist economic determinism à la

Herbert Spencer—or at most as one ―subsystem‖ in an inextricably tangled-up web of

omnidirectional effects and tautology, like in the ―political culture‖ agenda of

publications like Almond and Verba‘s The Civic Culture (Almond and Verba 1963).

Against this backdrop, Haas had little reason to delve deeply into the ideational side of

his subject, and quickly concluded that ―Europe‖ meant too many different things to too

many people for any such ideas to be very important: ―‗Europeanism,‘ he asserted, ―now

does not provide a doctrine useful for the study of the integration process‖ (Haas 1958,

28, his emphasis). He turned instead to pluralistic interest groups as the ―building blocks

of a theory of politics,‖ and sought to account for the rise of the early European

Communities in some sort of evolution-of-positions process that was gradually

channeling the aggregation of clear interest groups in a supranational direction. Since

Haas‘s work was framed in the subfield of international relations, the inevitable

alternative view came from a realist dismissal of the possible significance of international

organizations that was based in the contrasting positional logic of an unambiguous

21

distribution of power. Though this alternative was often voiced in Stanley Hoffmann‘s

artful, less sciencey essays (most famously Hoffmann 1966), in which ideas and

interpretation were not so explicitly excluded, the main thrust of the debate reproduced

IR‘s central divide between an emphasis on economic interdependence and aggregation

of interest groups and a rather unadorned conception of power politics.

When latter-day Haasian institutionalists and Moravcsik relaunched this debate in the

1980s around the relaunch of the European Communities themselves, the debate became

still more explicitly positional. Moravcsik recrafted Hoffmann‘s broad realism into a

clever combination of IR realism and IR neoliberalism, boiling down the EU story to a

stepwise mix of interest groups reacting to economic positions and states reacting to

positions in a distribution of power. Haasian neofunctionalism morphed into a more

explicit institutionalism that focused mainly on showing that this nationally-framed

aggregation of positions failed to capture what happened when early institution-building

steps altered the shape of the positional obstacle course. They argued that aggregation of

economic positions came out differently when an organizational obstacle course of

supranational rules and institutional actors was set over them. As I have emphasized

above, these were theoretically coherent, plausible, important approaches, but they only

represented a truncated consideration of imaginable dynamics by which the EU had

arisen. Everyone was looking for some variant of a story in which the positional lay of

the land, possibly with feedback from organizations, had channeled clear societal

interests toward the EU outcome.4 Nobody was looking to see if these groups or

4Moravcsik‘s later book version of his argument (1998) did set up what he calls a ―geopolitical ideology‖

alternative to this theory. But this odd conflation of realist-style foreign policy logic and unspecified

ideological commitments did not amount to serious consideration of an ideational alternative.

22

organizations even had clear or consensual understandings of their interests to begin with

(Parsons 2000).

Historiography on the EU, meanwhile, followed a similar path with a delay to allow

for these events to become ―history.‖ A more specific version of the Parsonian

delegitimation of ideas and culture in political science operated through early work on the

postwar European movements, most notably by Lipgens (1977, 1982; also Brugmans

1965). As Milward and many others would later critique, Lipgens seemed not to care

whether the Europeanists he catalogued had any real political power or put their rhetoric

into consequential action. In Milward‘s words (1992, 16), ―As a historical method this

resembled beachcombing and the sheer volume of the findings was presumably supposed

to prove that it could only have been washed up by a high historical tide.‖ In addition to

this very weak ideational foil, then, Milward and the other historians who began to

address EU history in the 1980s and 1990s also inherited a framing of their big questions

that was strongly parallel to the inheritance in the international relations subfield of

political science: the European Communities were either about diplomatic history

(informed substantially by positional realist thinking) or economic history (informed

substantially by positional liberal-materialist thinking, or marxisant competitors). These

theoretical frames were not nearly so explicit and parsimonious in history as in political

science, of course, but they presumably had a similar effect as Milward made his

evidentiary choices: his task was to figure out how the positioning of European decision-

makers and societal groups had made the EU rationally necessary, not to problematize the

background assumption of positional explanation.

23

Happily, in my view, these conditions changed rapidly in both disciplines in the later

1990s. In history, the first generation of EU studies had consolidated in a traditional

positional vocabulary just as much of the rest of the discipline took its ―linguistic‖ or

―cultural‖ turns. The second generation of EU historians would be considerably more

open to consideration of ideas, culture and interpretation, and to interdisciplinary

interaction with political scientists as well (Ludlow 1997, 2006; Kaiser 2008; see also

Kaiser et al 2009). In political science, the rise of constructivism in IR, the ―ideas‖

literature in comparative political economy, and parallel developments in other parts of

the field opened up more and more debates and research designs to ideational alternatives

as the 1990s progressed (McNamara 1998; Jabko 1999; Parsons 2000, 2002, 2003;

Christiansen et al 2001; Checkel 2001; Schimmelfennig 2002; Rittberger 2005; Lewis

2005). In European politics more specifically, this coincided with the arrival of a large

new generation of EU-focused political scientists in the United States, and an even larger

one in Europe, who entered college and graduate school during the 1980s ―relaunch‖ and

the heady days of the end of the Maastricht Treaty. Many continued in the positional lines

set by their materialist or institutionalist predecessors, certainly, but they tended to do so

within a broadened and more pluralistic debate.

But the foundational treatments of EU history were well established before these

developments, at a time when the main framing of these debates instructed scholars to

choose a positional view and defend it rather than to look in a more open-ended way at

how patterns and processes of action mapped on to positions in the world. That, I suspect,

is part of the story of how some of the most sophisticated thinkers in political science and

24

history managed to overlook basic evidentiary disjunctures in their narratives of EU

history.

Conclusion

At one level, this paper is a narrow complaint about the errors of a few scholars. The two

most prominent of them, Moravcsik and Milward, have already received a tremendous

amount of criticism over the years—especially Moravcsik, and for good reason. A reader

of this paper might complain of wasted time: there are no dragons here left to slay, and by

my own account, most people working on the EU in political science and history have

moved on.

But even if this is a hastily-written conference paper which deserves some criticism,

there is a larger point here. To my knowledge, no one has pointed out this shared set of

problems in matching patterned theoretical logics to patterned evidence in this context (or

elsewhere, for that matter).5 The vast majority of criticisms of Milward, Moravcsik, and

the Haasian institutionalists are either theoretical or empirical: that they theorize

integration or European politics incorrectly, that they have missed some other important

alternative, or that this or that claim about the world is wrong or incompletely

demonstrated. Very little of the criticism has been methodological. Moravcsik has even

become a standard participant in forums and summer-schools on qualitative and historical

methods in social science. This hints to me that the very simple point I have made is not

5Ironically, the person who has come closest in the EU context may be Moravcsik, who has made at least

somewhat similar critiques of his institutionalist opponents: he suggests that they spend too much time

trying to show that the European Commission is entrepreneurial and persuasive and not enough time

showing that the actors with most of the formal power—national governments—were actually persuaded of

anything (Moravcsik 1999). He is right.

25

nearly as widely recognized as one might expect it to be. The later generations of political

scientists and historians writing about the EU may not suffer so dramatically from similar

evidentiary disjunctures, but perhaps only because more of them make more multicausal

or partly-ideational arguments—not because they have internalized the notions of

matching positional evidence to positional theories, and the value of putting positional

arguments in competition with ideational ones.

To end on a provocative note, then, this indeed is what I suspect: that if in this paper I

had stuck to my original plans for a much broader survey of the methodological choices

of political scientists and historians writing about EU history, I would have found that

more recent work only does a bit better with respect to matching positional claims to

patterned evidence or putting them in clear competition with ideational alternatives.

Today‘s scholars may have learned theoretical lessons in reacting to these earlier

explanations, but may still need to be warned of the methodological lesson for which the

older scholarship is a series of cautionary tales.

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