Macro-lite: Ways to Understand Europe-Making in the Global Era

Abstract:

In this article, I interrogate elements of a global and European Studies scholarship to be found in the imbrication of sociological institutionalism, modern systems theory and network analysis, where the latter includes complexity models of social (dis)order. I note tensions between them and express concern with their bloodless treatment of agency and, more variably, consciousness while still holding out the possibility of synergy. I argue that there is a strong case for dispensing with any constraining levels of analysis approach to understanding Europe-making, favouring a version best described as ‘macro-lite’. In doing so, I endorse the premise of the special issue that much scholarship under the rubric of European Studies has been too narrowly focused and too constrained by normative or ideological positions, by disciplinary firewalls, by territorialist and ‘internalist’ constructions and even by the ‘integration’ motif, to comprehend the extent to which European/EU agency is socially constructed at the global level and enacted through the imbrication of actors, institutions and networks that cross scales at all levels, sometimes rendering them nugatory.