A Socio-Histoire of Europeanisation: Methodological Perspectives for Analysing Social Policy in a European Context

Abstract

In recent years, diachronic comparisons have become quite popular in the study of European integration processes (Caporaso 1996; Habermas 2000; Didry et al. 2000; Abelshauser 2009). Such comparisons represent attempts in the social sciences to analyse political, legal and economic processes of Europeanisation and the transformations in society they induce. However, researchers undertaking diachronic comparisons face two major problems. Since sociologists’ terminological toolbox is pre-structured by nationally- constituted categories, scholars lack clear concepts for analysing emergent social realities at the European level. Classic sociology implicitly equates its concept of society with the nation-state instead of conceptualising the nation as a manifestation of a specific cultural and historical period (Tenbruck 1981: 348; Bielefeld 2003, 2012). One result is that the societal transformation generated by Europeanisation is assessed on the basis of methodological nationalism (Beck and Sznaider 2006). Moreover, societal transformation is examined only as a consequence of the kind of Europeanisation processes that the representatives of nation-states initiate and attempt to control through international treaties, legal harmonisation and legal codification or via the regulation and deregulation of markets and competition. That Europeanisation processes can also be a response to uncertainty in interactive situations or to a crisis of societal orders and, in particular, the orders of the nation-state is a possibility that has hardly been addressed in current research on Europe.