Volume 1 / Athens 1999 Academic Inputs & Outputs of European Integration by Vassilis Pesmazoglou The present text comes partly as a response to the contribution of G. Kokkinos on European Studies and seeks to broaden and diversify the discussion on the issue. Regarding specific points raised by Kokkinos on the dominance, within a semi-hierarchical multicultural framework, of the "northwest European" cultural pattern, it seems to me that this is only too natural given that: a) it is from these northwest European countries that the whole venture of European integration was initiated and proved to be, at least up to now, a success story; b) in any case, and from a longer perspective going back not only decades but even centuries, the terms of the debate on economy and society for both "Northwestern" and peripheral European nations were set in the former and were imported, so to speak, into the latter (this applies to liberal, radical, marxist and even, recently, so-called neoliberal ideas); c) in the post-war era, peripheral European countries, both South and East, were plagued by a combination of lagging socio-economic development and authoritarian political systems which made large sections of the population look in the direction of the EC (i.e. Northwest Europe) as a model to be adopted for the improvement of their lot. These considerations go a long way to explaining the almost natural way through which the dominance Kokkinos refers to has been established. This being said, let me diversify the discussion on the academic impact of European integration. The last decades have witnessed a proliferation of academic activities in the field of European Studies, including teaching, research, and publications. This new phenomenon can be seen as a result of two independent developments which have coincided: a. the progress of European integration since the late 1950s and b. the tremendous increase in the number of Universities, students, staff and social science curricula, which has taken place more or less in the same period. European Studies is itself a product of history: given the fact that four decades have elapsed since the signing of the Treaty of Rome, we now have enough material to analyse this sui generis interaction between European integration and "its" academic community. It seems useful, from the outset, to make a distinction between two different, albeit interrelated, aspects: a) the study of European integration per se and b) European Studies in general. As opposed to G. Kokkinos' contribution to this journal, the present text will concentrate chiefly on the former aspect. Over the last decades, the study of the European Community (EC) or Union (EU) has gradually permeated such fields as, for instance, economics, political sciences, legal studies and international relations. Given the complexity and diversity of European integration, this has led to an interdisciplinary approach, which brings together and combines - albeit with different dosages and emphases - these various academic fields. In other words, we have a historical phenomenon which, because of its importance and uniqueness, gradually becomes an area of study, and furthermore, from a certain point onwards, fosters this study. Indicatively, in the period 1990-1997 the EC/EU has financed, through the Jean Monnet Program alone, more than 1,500 European courses, modules, chairs or research projects in the 15 member states. The academic fields involved have been law (493), economics (420), political sciences (310), and history (130), the remaining few being multidisciplinary projects. This is, of course, only part of the story and corresponds to the most conspicuous aspect of the tremendous push, by the Brussels quasi-statal authorities, to promote research and teaching in this new field of "Eurology". There are also other projects and means through which the academic interest in European integration has been facilitated and furthered by the Brussels authorities. Indicatively enough, the EC/EU Commission has itself started compiling information on European research and courses. According to the 1996 "Nouvelles Universitaires Européennes" and its supplement, there are about 150 post-graduate European Studies degrees offered in EU member states' universities. Furthermore, the "Euristote" database, produced by the Catholic University of Louvain at the request of the EC Commission, contains more than 15,000 research projects and names approximately 6,000 professors and researchers on European integration in 420 universities throughout the world. Their work concerns primarily the fields of law, economics, political science and history, but also sociology, geography, agronomy, demography and environmental sciences. Finally, whereas in the early 1960s there were less than half a dozen academic journals specialising in European Studies - e.g. the Journal of Common Market Studies (UK), Common Market Law Review (NL), Revue du Marché Commun (F) - over the last decades there has been a proliferation of such publications . Even if there had been no material and moral support from the Brussels authorities, the academic community would surely have pursued "Eurological" activities, on the one hand because of the interesting and challenging questions the EC/EU provides and, on the other, because of the creation of a particular "niche" in the labour market: i.e. the increased demand, both in the Brussels and in the national or even regional administrations, but also by firms, professional organisations, pressure groups and mass media, for specialists in what the EC/EU is all about. Studying Europe has, at some point, provided interesting and lucrative job prospects, but nowadays, the proliferation of such degrees and graduates seems to have put an end to this bonanza. The above constitute a so-to-speak direct academic offspring of European integration. European Studies at large, in the sense of a broad, multicultural non-nation-state-centered approach to the society and history of various countries (or European "regions") is a different, although related, development. It may be labelled an indirect academic result of European integration, in the sense that it has partly emerged out of an ideological need to construct a common European identity, pretty much along the lines of the construction, in the 18th and especially the 19th century, of modern national identities. The Brussels authorities have surely contributed to it in various ways. A small part of the aforementioned J. Monnet actions (in particular the ones linked with history departments) can be considered conducive to a "European" historical perspective and to a common "European" prism through which to see events such as the two World Wars which, in retrospect, may well end up being labelled as "Civil" wars - assimilating themselves to the American model. This indirect spill-over effect of European integration is much less "focused" and practical (in the sense of providing specific job prospects) and functions more in the realm of culture/ideology. As opposed to "Eurology", which has resulted in a quite uniform academic community throughout Europe (and even the US), as manifested by the various branches of the ECSA (European Community Study Association), European Studies in this latter sense varies considerably from one country to another. It seems to prevail particularly in the Anglosaxon academic world but is much less developed in continental Europe and almost totally absent in peripheral countries such as Greece. The above typology seems to be a fair account of the academic results or "outputs" of European integration to the present day. Such fields of study would have been unthinkable forty years ago, either simly because the research object was just absent (there was no EEC-EC-EU) or because this specific "European" way of seeing was rather irrelevant and marginal to academic policy-makers. As regards the other part of the equation, the obvious question which arises is: to what extent and in what ways has the academic community affected the process of constructing Europe? This is, expectedly, a vast and intricate question. But given its importance, I will try to provide some tentative lines of response. As far as European Studies are concerned, their scope and nature is such that the only thing we could say is that, in the long run, by contributing to a broader knowledge and understanding of various European identities, by molding mentalities, they may well be a small reinforcing factor of the "deepening" of European integration. But this is bound to depend largely on the dissemination of such ideas to the society at large, i.e. to the linkages of this subset of academia with the media. This familiarisation process need not be synchronised with developments such as the enlargement of the EU to Central-Eastern Europe, or the creation of a common currency. The relative motions and inertias of the various levels (economic, political, institutional) are by no means the same with biological time and changes in mentality from one generation to the next. And, of course, there are many counteractive forces at work; for instance, at present, the acute social problems in Europe are conducive to a certain Europhobia which is a concrete, understandable and politically exploitable manifestation of a general fear of change, of insecurity and xenophobia. As regards the effect of the strictu sensu studies of European integration on major policies and develoments of the EC/EU, they seem to have been rather marginal. Although there has been a certain physical proximity, in the sense of academics recycling themselves in the Brussels machinery and officials maintaining links with academic institutions, it is fair to say that the major initiatives and changes, the so-to-speak "deepening and widening" of the EC/EU have been politically motivated and determined. It was not the economic literature on the welfare effects of free trade and on customs unions which provided the impetus for the Treaty of Rome or the Single Market project; furthermore, as regards the Maastricht Treaty, the economic theory on "optimal currency areas" has been of little positive predictive value on the future effects of the "euro". The whole process of European integration has been primarely politically determined, with major economic actors - such as the European Round Table of Industrialists - also participating in the decision-making process, with small and medium lobbyists having some say, and with the specialised academic community following closely in the quest for new research material - or even terminology (e.g, the key word "cohesion", coined within the Brussels bureaucracy, has made its way into academic writings). At some points in time, academia was called upon ex post to provide an analysis/legitimation of major decisions which had already been taken. A characteristic case is the voluminous Cecchini report on the "Costs of Non-Europe" which attempted to analyse and quantify the economic benefits of the single market venture "1992". Finally, even major theoretical academic debates on European integration have by no means been politically neutral; for example, intergovernmentalists adopt a "realist" approach and consider European integration as a series of successive bargains between nation states, whereas neo-institutionalists emphasize the supranational nature of the Brussels quasi-statal edifice. Behind these two academic schools of thought one can easily discern divergent ideological-political patterns of what the EC/EU not only was or is , but ought to be/become. Which leads us to a more general remark. The study of European integration is in a way a specific branch of social sciences in general. "Eurologists" affect European developments pretty much to the same extent that academic economists, sociologists or political scientists contribute to the solution of economic, social or political problems, i.e. only marginally. Futhermore, this area of study exhibits certain interesting particularities/specificities: a large part of Eurological production thrives in the "grey area" between academia and journalism, simply because its novelty reflects more the new developments in the EC/EU than a new approach. On the other hand, partly as a reaction to this "journalistic" aspect, there has been some highy mathematical modelling of the European integration process with dubious practical political significance. However, a new and potentially rewarding research area could be a historical examination of how, over the last decades, "Europe" has entered the media vocabulary, has infiltrated company archives, and has increasingly permeated political discourse. Such research may also include the gradual constuction of the discipline of European Studies itself. One would expect that the thematic shifts have reflected, occasionally with interesting time lags, the change in the EC/EU itself from just a customs union in the late 1960s, where trade liberalisation issues dominated, to something more, leading in the late 1980s to "cohesion" matters and, in the late 1990s, to monetary inegration issues. Such study may also focus on the Euroeschatology which, at various points in time, has developed chiefly in the mass media but also in academic circles, on matters such as "1992" and, nowadays the single currency: as if European integration, in its constant need for momentum and fear of stagnation - exemplified by the "bicycle paradigm" - has always needed some kind of quasi-apocalyptic deadlines. In conclusion, I hope that the above points will contribute to the debate on the nature of European Studies, in its various manifestations, and that they might constitute a "meta-eurological" research agenda: a historical and epistemological approach to this academic field can both enrich it and contribute to its better self-knowledge. Return to Top