This argument has been put most forcefully by Thomas Christiansen, Knud Erik Jшrgensen, and Antje Wiener in their introduction to the special issue of the Journal of European Public Policy (1999: 529):
A significant amount of evidence suggests that, as a process, European integration has a transformative impact on the European state system and its constituent units. European integration itself has changed over the years, and it is reasonable to assume that in the process agents’ identity and subsequently their interests have equally changed. While this aspect of change can be theorized within constructivist perspectives, it will remain largely invisible in approaches that neglect processes of identity formation and/or assume interests to be given endogenously.
In other words, the authors begin with the claim that the EU is indeed reshaping national identities and preferences, and reject rationalist approaches for their inability to predict and explain these phenomena. Not surprisingly, constructivist accounts of the EU have been forcefully rebutted by rationalist theorists (Moravcsik 1999; Checkel and Moravcsik 2001).
According to Moravcsik (1999: 670) constructivist theorists raise an interesting and important set of questions about the effects of European integration on individuals and states. Yet, he argues, constructivists have failed to make a significant contribution to our empirical understanding of European integration, for two reasons. First, constructivists typically fail to construct ‘distinct falsifiable hypotheses’, opting instead for broad interpretive frameworks that can make sense of almost any possible outcome, and are therefore not subject to falsification through empirical analysis. Secondly, even if constructivists do posit hypotheses that are in principle falsifiable, they generally do not formulate and test those hypotheses so as to distinguish clearly between constructivist predictions and their rationalist counterparts. Until constructivists test their hypotheses, and do so against prevailing and distinct rationalist models, he argues, constructivism will not come down ‘from the clouds’ (Checkel and Moravcsik 2001).