Introduction: Law, Lawyers, and Transnational Politics in the Production of Europe

Abstract

Often described as a rational construction, European integration is more like a loosely coordinated set of competing enterprises, either economic, political, juridical, or military, resulting in a growing number of international organizations and European institutions that, today, form the complex structure of what we call “Europe.” Reflecting this multidimensional and multilevel polity, “European studies” make up a rather heterogeneous field of research in which competing social sciences, history, law, economics, sociology, and political science seek to provide the most relevant paradigm explaining the dynamics of integration. This interplay between the social process and its scientific explanation is also to be understood in the light of the constant double game that scholars themselves played in European integration history, both descriptive and prescriptive. On both sides of the Atlantic, early European integration studies were closely linked to early European integration enterprises, and part of the initial investment of the United States on the European scene was an academic investment. The three main books published in the United States in the late 1950s, for instance, that gave such a critical impulsion to the emerging field of European studies, The Uniting of Europe (Haas 1958), The Struggle to Unite Europe (Zurcher 1958), and The Schuman Plan (Diebold 1959), were all embedded in the multiple investments in Europe of this small “milieu” known as the American foreign policy establishment. A professor of political science at New York University, Arnold Zurcher was among the main supporters of Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi and a member of the American Committee on United Europe created by Allen Dulles; William Diebold served in the Office of Strategic Services during World War II, before he joined the Division of Commercial Policy of the Department of State and became Director of economic studies of the Council on Foreign Relations; while Ernst Haas served in the Army Military Intelligence before appointment to Columbia and Berkeley.

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