2006: European Integration and Income Inequality

The construction of a regional political econ-omy in Western Europe through the cre-ation, expansion, and institutionalization of the European Union (EU) raises a critical socio-logical question: what role has European inte-gration had in the recent widely noted increase in income inequality within Western European societies? Many political scientists and EU scholars have speculated on the implications of European integration for national income inequality. Many argue that European integra-tion should exacerbate income gaps in EU coun-tries (Boje, van Steenbergen, and Walby 1999; Kosonen 1995), but others suggest that European integration actually may insulate EU countries against the polarizing effects of glob-alization (Moses 1995). Although sociologists of stratification, especially U.S.-based sociolo-gists, have not yet devoted sustained empirical attention to European integration (Therborn 1999), sociological approaches to income inequality readily extend to regional integra-tion, and these approaches suggest that region-al integration should affect income inequality. Given the centrality of economic inequality to the discipline of sociology (Kenworthy forth