The historical and political sociology of the European Union: A uniquely French methodological approach?

Abstract

This article provides an overview of the hundred or so articles on historical and political sociology of the European Union (EU) published in France over the past 2 years (particularly around the sociology of knowledge and sociology of trajectories and positions of the social agents and groups who make up the European political space), and analyzes some of their contributions to the international debate, focusing on the central political and institutional space of the EU.

Building Europe on a Weak Field: Law, Economics, and Scholarly Avatars in Transnational Politics

“…Our approach also has a synthetic aim, bringing an emergent Bourdieuinspired political sociology of the European Union (Vauchez 2008(Vauchez , 2011Georgakakis 2009Georgakakis , 2012Bigo and Madsen 2011;A. Cohen 2011A.…”

The Social Construction of Law: The European Court of Justice and Its Legal Revolution Revisited

“…This review takes a considerably different view on the process by focusing not so much on the reified collective actors, the Court, the state(s), and so forth, that were trapped in this so-called spillover mechanism, but rather on the collective action of the specific transnational entrepreneurs, networks, and microcosms that triggered this yet very uncertain legal revolution. Drawing from well-established theoretical tools and empirical strategies (Bourdieu 1987, Abbott 1988) that have already been applied to the study of international law (Dezalay & Garth 1996, we engage in a more sociologically informed understanding of European integration through law (Cohen & Vauchez 2007, in particular by remodeling Bourdieu's field theory (Bourdieu 1996) for the purpose of studying transnational social spaces (on Bourdieu's field theory and the study of transnational processes, see Bigo & Madsen 2011; on the sociological turn in European studies, see Favell & Guiraudon 2009, Georgakakis 2009, Saurugger & Mérand 2010. In what follows, we argue that the general dynamics of the emerging European www.annualreviews.org • The Social Construction of Law field of power, as well as the socioprofessional profiles of the members of the Court, strongly determined the early path toward constitutionalization, here understood as an open-ended process in which the early decisions of the Court have been retrospectively reconstructed as a revolution by a transnational community of legal professionals gaining momentum in the nascent European legal field.…”

How Does the European Commission Create a European Civil Society with Words? A Discourse Theoretical Inquiry

“…It is also possible to add Pierre Bourdieu-inspired sociological studies to interpretive approach, as they also study civil society as a constructed field(Georgakakis, 2009). …”