Richard McMahon

Progress, democracy, efficiency: normative narratives in political science EU studies

ABSTRACT This article identifies influential political narratives in the 73 currently most highly cited political science articles on the EU. It is based on systematic analysis of expressions of normativity, which signal that European integration, or its institutions or policies, are bad, good, flourishing or declining. A normative narrative of continuous progress in integration, connected with a 1990s grand theoretical debate in EU studies, accounts for much of the positive tone of EU studies until about 1998. Narratives about the EUs democratic deficit and its impact beyond its borders help explain the subsequent negative turn in EU studies normativity.

Fall and Rise: Normativity in Political Science Writing on the EU*

Sociologists of science emphasize the crucial role of the day†to†day practices of scholars in defining academic disciplines and epistemological schools. Taking the case of EU Studies (EUS), this article examines the key practice of normative writing. I analyze the degree to which 70 highly†cited journal articles of political science writing in EUS explicitly or implicitly suggest that European integration or its institutions or policies are bad or good, flourishing or declining. I use this discourse analysis, plus biographical data on the authors of texts, to explain a major temporal pattern. Degrees of normativity in EUS articles progressively declined from the 1970s until the millennium, but then subsequently recovered. Factors ‘external’ to scholarship, such as the progressive intensification of European integration and crises faced by the EU help explain this pattern. However they interacted in complex ways with ‘internal’ academic factors, such as generational replacement, ‘mainstreaming’ and rivalries between sub†disciplinary and theoretical camps.

Narrating European integration: transnational actors and stories

ABSTRACT This article introduces the special issue on narrating European integration. Narratives, or stories, are a key mechanism for constructing individual and collective identities, and other politically important elements of discourse. The articles in this special issue go beyond most existing work on narratives. First, they examine the actors and networks, ranging from EU institutions to political parties and social groups, which create, foster and disseminate narratives. Second, they address major narratives and sets of narrating actors of at least a partly transnational nature. Third, the authors transgress disciplinary boundaries, drawing on contemporary history, sociology, political science and cultural studies.

Religion, civilisation, geography: normative EU studies and eastern enlargement

Abstract Taking scholarship on the European Union’s (EU) 2004 eastern enlargement as a case study, this article asks whether EU studies scholars make normative judgements about how far east the EU should expand and whether these judgements involve civilisational thinking. Civilisations are categories devised by scholars to classify peoples into coherent ancient, continental-scale cultural groups, largely defined by shared history and religious tradition. They matter for their supposed political and historical significance. This article finds that normative civilisational references to eastern enlargement are quite common in EU studies but usually marginal. They are implied, for example, in the terms Europe, West and East, or in throwaway remarks in the introductions of scholarly articles. Constructivist scholarship deconstructs normative language in two – competing – civilisational narratives, associated with either the progressive West or traditional Christian Europe, which probably helped persuade Western European leaders to enlarge the EU to the east and are severely damaging Turkey’s candidacy. EU studies also applies a historical sociology approach to culture. They suggest that historical legacies which are deeply embedded in the social structures and practices of specific groups of people over the longue durée create the social and economic conditions that determine suitability for EU membership.

Race Classifiers and Anthropologists

To achieve social recognition and influence, nineteenth-century race classifiers successfully established science-political, interdisciplinary and transnational alliances. However, contradictions within and among these alliances led to the project’s twentieth-century collapse. This chapter is about these alliances and tensions and the spatial patterns they produced within this networked scholarly community.

The Irish Dilemma: Nineteenth-Century Science and Celtic Identity

This chapter spotlights the eclectic relationships of nineteenth-century ethnology with history, philology and literary studies. Irish race classifiers used these interdisciplinary links to capitalise on Ireland’s living Celtic language.

Between International Science and Nationalism: Interwar Romanian Race Science

This chapter focuses on the interwar period, and especially the relationship between anthropometric raciology and serology. It examines the techniques used by Romanian race anthropologists, the stories they told about national identity and origins, and what these reveal about the local reception and manipulation of ideas in weak peripheries. Like the Irish, Romanian anthropologists were at the very edge of both the transnational network of race classification and of local nationalist identity narration. Institutionalisation of anthropology fell behind that of Hungary and even after systematic research took off in the 1930s, only achieved a degree typical of 1870s–1880s Western Europe.

European Race Classifications: Anthropology, Ethnicity and Politics

This chapter examines the stories that race classifiers told about nations and other social identities in Europe. Races were initially equated with ethno-linguistic groups like Celts, Teutons and Slavs, which romanticism made central to national political identity.

How Classification Worked

This chapter examines how political and scientific agendas interacted with scholarly practices and concepts. Three sections each address the chronological evolution of a particular aspect of this question, starting with the classification of Europeans as a scientific enterprise. Section two traces how political imperatives supported a remarkably durable ‘central tradition’ of race classification. Despite changing scientific concepts and research methods, this central tradition thrived for over a century in successive ethnological, anthropological and raciological disciplinary coalitions.

Introduction: Rediscovering a Lost Science

This book is a transnational history of national identity. It tells the strange story of a Europe-centred scientific community which, roughly from the 1830s to the 1940s, investigated human biology in order to reveal the racial ‘true’ identities of European nations. Race classification was especially central to the construction of ethnic families (e.g. Celts, Teutons, Slavs), a key component of national identity. Biologists lent ethnic nations the prestige of natural science, and justified them as natural ‘national races’ (my term), whose psychological characteristics, conflicts and geopolitical relationships extended back into prehistory.