Bulletin n. 2/2011
October 2011
CONTENTS
  • Section A) The theory and practise of the federal states and multi-level systems of government
  • Section B) Global governance and international organizations
  • Section C) Regional integration processes
  • Section D) Federalism as a political idea
    • Didier Georgakakis
    Don’t Throw Out the “Brussels Bubble” with the Bathwater: From EU Institutions to the Field of Eurocracy
    in International Political Sociology , Volume 5, Issue 3 ,  2011 ,  331–334
    The study-field of EU institutions, or the “Brussels complex” (according to the expression of Stone Sweet, Sandholtz, and Fligstein 2001), seems to have been so dominated for several decades by institutionalist scholars (old and neo) that most of the new sociologists of the European Union try to move out from this point to consider broader social spaces. Many different reasons clearly justify this turn. For instance, and as suggested in this symposium, the EU institutions’ area cannot be completely confused with the power of the European Union; other more or less competitive transnational trends and the internal structure of member states are also important, and history and social mobilization can shape what happens with and within the European Union. It would thus be quite unsurprising if many political sociologists, rebuked by the epistemological distance and lack of interdisciplinary work between the social sciences and the dominant paradigms of EU studies, preferred to change the bath, so to speak. Changes are undoubtedly needed, but to move too quickly from studying the EU milieu may result in the baby (here the so-called Brussels Bubble) being thrown out with the bathwater.
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