Nevertheless, they see substantial progress in the debate, in which both sides generally accept a common standard of empirical testing as the criterion for useful theorizing about EU politics.
Integration theory today
European integration theory is far more complex than it was in 1977 when the first edition of this volume was published. In place of the traditional neo-functionalist/ intergovernmentalist debate, the 1990s witnessed the emergence of a new dichotomy in EU studies, pitting rationalist scholars against constructivists. During the late 1990s, it appeared that this debate might well turn into a metatheoretical dialogue of the deaf, with rationalists dismissing constructivists as ‘soft’, and constructivists denouncing rationalists for their obsessive commitment to parsimony and formal models. The past several years, however, have witnessed the emergence of a more productive dialogue between the two approaches, and a steady stream of empirical studies allowing us to adjudicate between the competing claims of the two approaches.
Furthermore, whereas the neo-functionalist/intergovernmentalist debate was limited almost exclusively to the study of European integration,3 the contemporary rationalist/ constructivist debate in EU studies mirrors larger debates among those same schools in the broader field of international relations theory. Indeed, not only are EU studies relevant to the wider study of international relations, they are in many ways the vanguard of international relations theory, insofar as the EU serves as a laboratory for broader processes such as globalization, institutionalization, and socialization.
Despite these substantial measures of progress, however, the literature on European integration has not produced any consensus on the likely future direction of the integration process.