Sociology and the European Union

International audienceIn the 1950s and 1960s, the first scholars who studied the postwar institutions that would develop into the EU were influenced by the dominant social science paradigm of their times and sociologists such as Talcott Parsons. They were interested in European integration, the complex process whereby supranational political institutions would generate strong crossborder economic cooperation, thus leading to social interactions between people in the member states and creating new allegiances towards a new political centre and a sense of shared identity beyond the nation-state. Sociologists then disappeared from the field until the 1990s for reasons that we will examine. The core of the chapter then focuses on the "return" of a research agenda inspired by major sociological traditions. "Bringing sociology back in" first meant focusing on the social bases of political integration at a time on the one hand and the effects (or lack thereof) of EU rules. This agenda has developed as many observed the end of the permissive consensus underpinning the European project, what Neil Fligstein labelled the "Euroclash". Beyond extending the realm of EU studies beyond the study of EU institutions and laws, sociologists brought a number of theoretical perspectives and tools of empirical analysis. There are thus sociologies of the EU and the chapter will provide examples of this diversity