European Integration Studies and the European Union’s Eastern Gaze
| Author | Ian Klinke |
| Published date | 01 January 2015 |
| Date | 01 January 2015 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0305829814552833 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Millennium: Journal of
International Studies
2015, Vol. 43(2) 567 –583
© The Author(s) 2014
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DOI: 10.1177/0305829814552833
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MILLENNIUM
Journal of International Studies
European Integration
Studies and the European
Union’s Eastern Gaze
Ian Klinke
University of Oxford, UK
Abstract
European integration studies has recently seen the first signs of a belated critical turn. While
new approaches have started to challenge the way the European Union is conventionally
studied, they are yet to investigate in detail the relationship between the academic field and its
primary object of study. This article draws on work in critical geopolitics to explore one of the
interfaces of academic knowledge on European integration and the world of policy: the Jean
Monnet Programme. In highlighting the scheme’s role in the EU’s Eastern geopolitics, it argues
that European integration studies resembles other forms of area studies, such as cold war era
Sovietology. This comparison elucidates both the field’s long-standing resilience to critical theory
and its inability to anticipate the recent crisis of the European project.
Keywords
European Studies, area studies, knowledge, geopolitics, Eastern Europe, Sovietology
Introduction
Uniting a variety of disciplinary influences, European integration studies (short:
European Studies, sometimes EU Studies) tends to self-identify as the study of the
European Union’s institutions. While research on European integration has long devel-
oped sophisticated analyses of bureaucratic decision-making and institutional evolution,
debates in European Studies have often been limited to the types of problems that con-
cern Brussels practitioners, such as the coherence, convergence, effectiveness and suc-
cess of policies. More often than not, European integration studies tends to investigate
‘the extent to which integration has occurred, or the likelihood that it will occur in the
Corresponding author:
Dr Ian Klinke, School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford
OX1 3QY, UK.
Email: ian.klinke@ouce.ox.ac.uk
552833MIL0010.1177/0305829814552833Millennium: Journal of International StudiesKlinke
research-article2014
Article
568 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 43(2)
1. Chris Rumford and Philomena Murray, ‘Do We Need a Core Curriculum in European Union
Studies?’, European Political Sciences 3, no. 1 (2003): 85–92, 86.
2. Magnus Ryner, ‘Financial Crisis, Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy in the Production of Knowledge
about the EU’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 40, no. 3 (2012): 647–73, 650.
3. European Commission, ‘Lifelong Learning Programme: Guide 2013 Part IIa’, available at:
http://eacea.ec.europa.eu/llp/funding/2013/documents/jean_monnet_ka1 (2013) (accessed 20
December 2013), 2.
4. College of Europe, ‘College of Europe Brochure’, available at: https://www.coleurope.eu/
brochure (2013) (accessed 9 February 2014), 3, 18.
5. Maastricht University, ‘Master’s Programme: European Public Affairs’, available at http://
www.maastrichtuniversity.nl/web/Faculties/FASoS/TargetGroups/ProspectiveStudents/
MastersProgrammes/EuropeanPublicAffairs.htm (2014) (accessed 5 February 2014).
6. Alan Cafruny and Magnus Ryner, ‘The Study of European Integration in the Neoliberal
Era’, in A Ruined Fortress? Neoliberal Hegemony and Transformation in Europe, eds Alan
Cafruny and Magnus Ryner (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 1–13, 1.
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on European Union Politics (London: Sage, 2007).
future’.1 Such teleological readings of EU politics are often accompanied by an implicit
Europhile undertone that reproduces the discourse of Brussels institutions and think
tanks. In a biting critique of European Studies’ inability to account for the Eurozone
crisis, Magnus Ryner has recently spoken of a ‘European integration orthodoxy’ in the
pages of this journal to capture this combination of instrumentality, empiricism and lib-
eralism that dominates much of the field.2
Interestingly, this problem-solving approach has not been limited to research and
European universities have often promoted European Studies as a vocational degree.
Perhaps as a consequence, the field has tended to attract a career-oriented student body
that has eagerly targeted a number of EU-funded campuses and bureaucratic training cen-
tres such as the College of Europe (Bruges and Natolin campuses), the European
University Institute (Florence), the European Institute of Public Administration
(Maastricht), the Academy of European Law (Trier) and the International Centre for
European Training (Nice), all of which have been financed to pursue ‘an aim of European
interest’.3 Selling itself as ‘the most genuinely “European” of all the university institutes’,
the College of Europe promises its prospective students a professional environment and
interaction with senior EU officials and think-tankers.4 Similarly, Maastricht University
guarantees its postgraduates ‘practical assignments derived from the practice of European
public affairs, whereby in small international teams, under strict and tight deadlines, stu-
dents simulate the professional world as much as possible’.5
In emphasising its instrumental and problem-solving objectives in research and teach-
ing, European Studies has been strangely resilient to theoretical developments that have
swept through other parts of the Social Sciences.6 While most cognate disciplines have
gone through ‘critical’ and ‘self-reflective’ turns over the last two decades, the study of
European integration has only just witnessed the early stages of a deferred critical turn,
which has seen the emergence of chapters on critical European Studies in textbooks7 and
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