Political sociology and European integration

Abstract

"While the political, legal and economic sciences have been addressing the integration of Europe for decades now, sociology has held back for a considerable time. As a glance at the pertinent journal articles and edited volumes shows, this has now clearly changed. However, this new sociology of Europe that is developing currently is also exhibiting a bias: the majority of the studies examine social change and only focus marginally on integration processes and their effect. This is due to the fact that one is relying on the division of responsibilities with political scientists in which the sociologists study the integration of (former) national societies while the area of political Europisation is left up to the integration research undertaken by political scientists. Contra to this voluntary self-limitation of sociologists to what is related to society, the view is held here that political sociology is in a position to make a contribution that can be clearly differentiated from that of political science approaches on account of its perspective of observation and its theoretical points of application." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en))

Cite article

Bernhard, S. (2011): Politische Soziologie und europäische Integration. In: Soziologie, Vol. 40, No. 1, p. 20-43.